Interesting Links for 21-02-2015

[andrewducker]

• Would you like 5 million votes and 4 seats, or 1 million votes and 56 seats?
  (tags: politics uk voting )
• Netflix : Netflix Long Term View
  (tags: netflix )
• This is what happens to your brain when you give up sugar
  (tags: sugar )
• Who wants to see otters chasing a butterfly?
  Spoilers: it's you!
  (tags: otters cute )

Original post on Dreamwidth -

Comments

[f4f3]

Of course if you win most of the seats you stand in, you'll get a lot of seats...
I thought the whole point of this here United Kingdom was that we all vote for our own MPs, who can best represent our individual constituencies.

The argument that "first past the post is bad because you can be second in every seat in the country and not get a single MP" has merit, but it has nothing at all to do with how votes cast in a particular constituency elect an MP.

[andrewducker]

"I thought the whole point of this here United Kingdom was that we all vote for our own MPs, who can best represent our individual constituencies."

That's certainly not the point, as far as I'm concerned. That's the stupid system we're stuck with, but it's not one I approve of.

[f4f3]

As it happens, it's not a system I agree with either, but it is the selling point for parliamentary democracy.

[andrewducker]

I've been thinking about this, and I'm still confused.

Surely the point of electoral reform is that the current system is bad, and that we should reform how votes that are cast in _every_ constituency elect their MP?

[f4f3]

My problem with the article was the thrust of the article - which I took to be "The SNP may get 50 seats (I don't believe they will) while only having 3% of the national vote, and that this points up the problem with first past the post.

I'd say these are two separate issues - the SNP may do very well in 50 seats, while not standing at all in 550 others. Their proportion of the national vote is utterly irrelevant to the proportion of votes they may get in individual seats. It's possible (see the last Holyrood election) that they would take the same number of seats under at least some alternative voting systems.

If the same article was run without including the SNP, or by talking about their possible outcomes in the context of the limited number of seats in which they were standing, I'd have no problem with it at all.

[andrewducker]

"Their proportion of the national vote is utterly irrelevant to the proportion of votes they may get in individual seats"

Which is the point.

We have parliamentary democracy in Scotland _without_ the share of the national vote being largely divorced from the share of the number of represenatives.

Because "Parliamentary Democracy" is not dependent on FPTP in any way.