eli5 How can a political party in the uk win more seats than the votes they won?

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uk politics just makes no sense to me no matter how many times i get it explained by teachers. i know that first past the post leads to disproportionate votes but have never understood the system of winning seats

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Simple: **individual seats are decided by the number of votes a party receives *locally*, *not* by the number of votes a party receives *nationally*.**

In the UK you have 650 “constituencies”, geographic districts each containing around 70-80 thousand citizens and each represented by exactly one member of parliament (MP).

But every constituency is different. In one constituency, there are two candidates for MP, but in another one there are six. In one constituency, voter turnout is ridiculously high, but in another one voter turnout is low.

Those differences are irrelevant to the individual outcomes though. All that matters is what happens *within* the individual constituency.

In a constituency with a high number of candidates and a low voter turnout, an MP from Party X might win the seat with just 15,000 votes. But in a constituency with a low number of candidates and a high voter turnout, the MP might need 37,000 votes to win.

So when you add up the votes *nationally*, one party might wind up with fewer votes *nationally*, but more seats. But **totalling up the number of votes a party receives nationally is *entirely irrelevant* to how MPs are selected**, because MPs are determined based what happens in *each individual cosntituency*.

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