UK Elections

Unfortunately I can't vote yet. I tried to get worked up about taxation without representation, but it's so hard to buy guns here, let alone tri-corner hats, I just grumbled a bit instead. But the election happened this week, or is still happening, sort of, and it's been pretty interesting.

First, all due props to the BBC website for

1. a truly fabulous comparison of where everyone stands [seriously, check it out for an example of the way political coverage should be]
2. a nice explanation of hung parliaments, that they've kept updated with specifics now
3. clear and well-updated results

I feel bad for the UK Independence Party, amassing well over 900k votes but not a single seat, whereas the Democratic Unionist party punches well above its weight with 8 seats on a mere 168k votes. I have no idea how districting works, but seems a bit favorable there for those unionists. I'm not quite sure what the UKIP is about, but they've described themselves as "non-rascist libertarian". If you have to disclaim your non-rascistness from the get-go, probably a bad sign. Maybe this is their way of saying, "we're not the BNP". For any Americans reading this, note that even the self-proclaimed "libertarians" of the UKIP are in favor of free public healthcare via the NHS. I guess this means they are either really crap at the libertarian thing or really evolved at it, depending on your viewpoint.

I don't like so-called "proportional representation" (PR), but it's big on the agenda for lib dems, and it's easy to see why. Labour gets 4.5x the seats as lib dems on only 1.26x as many votes. On the other hand, PR would give the BNP 12 seats instead of zero. Zero is a good thing.

If you look at number of votes required per seat, putting aside the UKIP and others who came up empty (BNP second with 564k votes and no seats), the ones who had to try hardest were the greens, securing a single seat on 286k votes, and lib dems second at nearly 120k votes/seat. Labour and conservatives were in the same range of 33-35k votes/seat, while the dem unionists got away with a mere 21k votes/seat.

Normalized by MPs per 100k votes (just because I like the sound of "mp100k"), the order is:

(dem unionist 4.8)
labour 3.0
tories 2.9
libdem 0.8

Or, normalized by taking the average number of voters per MP elected -- 29,653,638 total voters for 649 seats -- 1 seat left because a candidate died recently, election for that seat deferred, yielding one seat per every 45,691 people who voted. "mp45.7k" doesn't have the same ring to it, sadly:

labour 1.4
tories 1.3
libdem 0.4

So as you can see, labour and conservatives yield better than average return on votes, whereas libdem votes are a bad investment. (Although not really, because they now have more power than their overall showing might warrant because they are desperately needed by whomever attempts to setup a government.)

If PR were adopted, the biggest beneficiaries would be, of course, the UKIP and the BNP. But of parties who actually got seats in the election, percentage impact would be highest for greens, then lib dems, then SNP and plaid cymru, whereas biggest losers would be tories, then lab, then alliance party, then dem unionists.

My chart of fun facts & figures can be found here.