UK Politics / Reply to Ann (was Re: Is Umbridge a commentary on British govt. ed

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Goddlefrood wrote:
> <snip> Any 
> > party with more than ten percent of seats in the Parliament 
> > (it's a preferential voting system that's used, although 
> > basically first past the post) has to have a proportionate 
> > number of seats in Government. <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> 
> Forgive me for snipping essentially your whole post. (Anyone
> interested in the topic, please go upthread.) I can't speak
> intelligently on the topic and just want to ask what "first past the
> post" means. I'm unfamiliar with the term.
> 
> Carol, hopelessly apolitical and American to boot


Geoff:
Carol, it's precisely what it says. The person with the highest 
number of votes, regardless of the number of candidates is the 
winner.

I dislike it  because ot produces skewed results. Let's take a 
hypothetical example.

In an election, there are 100 voters and three candidates A, B 
and C. In the voting, A gets 31 votes, B gets 35 and C gets 34.
Under 'first past the post', B is declared elected.

But he or she has only attracted 35% of the vote. In the UK 
system, this produced a large number of MPs who are elected 
with less than 50% of the vote. It's not as drastic as my example 
but, about three elecions ago, I spent time analysing the entire 
650+ seats and found that 150 of them had MPs elected with 
less than 50% - the lowest was 38%. Which to me is not a 
representative result.

Hope that makes it clearer.