Because Labour MPs tend to represent those with lower voter registration figures, each Labour MP requires 114,0000 people to be elected. A Tory, under this system, requires 97,000.
The result is obvious. The system biases the Tories. It is estimated that they will gain 22 seats they do not deserve as a result.
This is gerrymandering. Tory corruption reaches far and wide.
The bit that Peter Kellner – the original source – brushes aside is that his population numbers include non-citizens. Whether legal or illegal.
Ho hum.
The only way to fix this unfairness to s to let Labour voters cast as many postal ballots as their community leaders want innit
Complete and utter lies. The distribution of seats has been deliberately distorted by successive Labour governments so that there are more Labour MPs than they deserve by ordering the Boundary Commission to draw boundaries so that constituencies in Labour-supporting areas have, on average, fewer voters than constituencies in conservative supporting areas. [In recent years this has boosted the number of SNP MPs, but that was not the intention].
ISTR Labour and the LD’s blocking redrawing the electoral maps a while back…
Steve +100
john77 – Correct
Assuming Murphy is now over his long COVID, it surely can’t be long before he’s struck down for a seventh time with the new “dangerous sub-variant” he’s just posted about and agitating for a further lockdown.
Is he trying to say that, if there’s a Labour MP in power, an extra 20 000 odd people can’t be bothered to vote??
I did a study back in 2013 digging through the numbers that showed that Spud’s assertion is near enough bollocks. I would link to it if I could remember where I’ve put it.
Plus, as pointed out, in a equal representative electoral system you allocate voting districts by the number of people registered to vote, not by the number of people ineligible to vote. But we all know that Labour do not believe in equal representative democracy, as that means the wrong people get to have a voice.
We’ve known for the last 25 years that this isnt true ( prob longer ).
Without the SNP Labour would have an automatic 50 seats more.
Is Murphy being a fool?
Any party that wins more seats will have a lower votes/seat ratio compared to that if they won fewer seats. That’s inherent in this system, regional concentrations aside.
Hence, is Spud simply taking advantage of the fact that the Conservatives currently have a lot more seats?
J77 outlines the true position. And we (roughly) arrive at that by comparing the number of seats two parties get, if they get an equal number of votes. Or how many votes it takes to achieve an equal number of seats. Ie, on a like for like basis.
Is Murphy being a fool?
Does the sun rise in the east? Is the pope a catholic? Do bears shit in the woods?
Isn’t the issue that every voting system will have pro’s and con’s so it’s just a question of which set of conditions you are prepared to accept, a flaw in one system doesn’t overall worse than another system. This is just cherry picking the con’s of one system to make a case for your preferred option, basically writing the conclusion then selecting the facts and data that support that conclusion
@ BniC
Exceptthat they are no *facts* selected by Murphy, just lies.
Yeah, as a qualified statistician, I am thoroughly pissed off by this because it leads people to think that “Lies, damn lies and Statistics” has some reality apart from people misquoting/utterly lying about statistics.
“ The bit that Peter Kellner – the original source – brushes aside is that his population numbers include non-citizens. Whether legal or illegal.”
That will be the university towns then.
I don’t remember Spud bleating when UKIP got 3.8m votes and 1 MP in 2015.
It gets complicated – EU nationals cannot found in national elections but they can in local. So they are *on* the electoral roll.
Should we count them when determining the constituencies for national elections? I believe we do. Fortunately it’s very unlikely to make a difference as EU nationals are widely located, a Pole in every postcode as they say.
The franchise needs a major overhaul to become to a plain simple Adult Citizen franchise. If I need to be a Japanese citizen to vote in Japan, you should bloody well need to be a UK citizen to vote in the UK. Unfortunately, the only people likely to reform the franchise are Labour who want to allow anybody with a pulse to vote in the UK.
Bongo: the national register is used to determine national redistricting, the local register is used to determine local redistricting. I’ve been through half a dozen of these things in the last 30 years. At the edges it can create some odd situations where, eg, an area is entitled to 4.9 divisions on one register but 5.1 on the other register, but mostly it manages to stay within a margin of error.
He can’t even read the report properly. It was 11 seats leading to a 22 seat swing. I pointed this out but of course he didn’t publish that.
Cheers for the explanation jgh: I didn’t realise two rolls are maintained.
@Longrider
From what I have gleaned of Catholic theology, no the current Bish of Rome isn’t even close.
“Because Labour MPs tend to represent those with lower voter registration figures, each Labour MP requires 114,0000 people to be elected. A Tory, under this system, requires 97,000.”
That’s some feckin’ tortured logic right there. If you’re in an area with more registered voters, you need to attract more votes to win. Now I’ve never stood for election myself, but I’d imagine that to be harder.
@ Sam Duncan
Children do not have the vote. So Murphy is trying to claim that Labour MPs need a large number of non-voting children (in addition to adults voting for oragainst them) in order to be elected.
No, logic will die under torture before it says the number of non-voters in a constituency affect the result of the election.
Re foreign citizenship. There’d be a case for scrapping Commonwealth voting rights since it’s usually not reciprocal for Brits abroad. I think it’s more likely that the franchise will be expanded to cover EU citizens, because in terms of electoral arithmetic it works in Labour’s favour and they can point to the Commonwealth rights as precedent. Whatever happens, we’re going to either continue with the current mess, or end up with a new mess, of who can vote in what election depending on what particular country they’re from.
I like the idea of restricting to UK citizens but for historical reasons any realistic solution is probably going to have to involve UK plus Irish citizens. Maybe just allowing Irish citizens to vote if resident in NI. Too many people in NI who are opposed to doing anything that involves accepting and documenting UK citizenship for restricting the franchise to be a wise idea – part risk of political violence, part the blowback from US and EU, and partly I imagine the lawyers would be all over it.