Member-only story
Voter’s regret
We all experience regret, but it’s an emotion to which there is more than meets they eye at first sight
It’s Friday the 13th, and the people of the UK have woken up to a new parliament. Yesterday at 10pm local time the polling stations closed in the third general election in less than five years. The results are in: the Conservatives have a sizeable majority. Might some members of the electorate regret what they did, or didn’t do yesterday?
This may sound a strange question: people simply vote for the candidate of the party of their preference, no? How can you possibly regret that?
A quirky system
Britain’s electoral system is constituency based (as opposed to party-list based). There are 650 constituencies, each of which elect one MP: the candidate with the most votes. Contrary to what one might intuitively expect, in this system it is not necessarily so that each party will have one MP for roughly each 1/650th of all the votes they gain. Every candidate of a party could, in theory, get say one third or more of the vote in their constituency, but if, in every case, there is another candidate with just a few more votes, the party may end up without a single representative in parliament. On the other hand, a popular independent candidate needs at most 50% of the…
