Lib Dem got 3.5mil votes and have 71 seats, Sinn Fein have 210,000 and seven seats
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The UK is not a place where seats are distributed proportionally to votes like in countries where you they used systems like mixed-member-proportional voting.
In the UK it is a first-past the post voting system.
That means seats are allocated per constituency. In each constituency different candidates compete with each other and the one that gets the most votes wins the seat for that constituency.
This means that the candidate does not have to have the majority of the vote in that constituency just more than any other candidate.
A party could theoretically win a majority of seats despite the majority of people in he UK having voted for candidates of a different party.
This system makes it very hard for small parties to succeed.
You don’t have to work towards getting a certain percentage of the overall vote, that won’t help you much. You have to work towards getting the most votes in a number of constituencies.
A party that is really popular in a few big cities and unpopular elsewhere fares better than a party that is somewhat popular everywhere.
Sinn Fein for example have all their voters concentrated in Northern Ireland and their candidates were the most popular ones in 7 constituencies there. So they got 7 seats (which they will never sit in) and it doesn’t matter how many other votes they got or didn’t get elsewhere.
Pretty sure the only time a Republican president has had more votes in my lifetime is Bush’s 2nd term but here we are, democracies do not always go purely by popular vote, they have weird labyrinthine rules
Imagine a simplified system where there are only 10 constituencies. Reform get 1000 votes in every seat, so 10000 in total. There’s one seat that’s very tightly contested and all the other parties get fewer than 1000 so Reform win but they don’t have enough votes in to win any other seat.
The Lib Dems, on the other hand, have focussed on 5 seats and get 1500 votes in each of them. In the other 5 they only get 500 so the total is still 10000. Those 1500 votes are enough to win those 5 constituencies but the 500s are not enough to win.
Both parties have the exact same number of votes but by being concentrated in particular areas the Lib Dems have won more seats
In the UK, local representatives are voted in by taking whoever gets the highest number of votes in a given electorate. This is called First Past the Post (FTPT) and it can and does routinely lead to issues where a candidate who less than half of people want, gets the vote, meaning a lot of votes get “wasted”.
Let’s make an example election with 3 candidates; Ms Carington, Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale.
Each is campaigning on a specific mode of transport (cars, buses, and bikes).
In the seat of Littleton, there’s a relatively well-developed urban center, where a majority of people live, however, the electorate is large and has a relatively large population of people living rurally.
Election time comes around, and the urban voters are mostly split between Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale as they all want to avoid expensive city parking fees, and those candidates both represent an alternate means of transport.
The rural voting population however, relies on cars to be able to get anywhere, and they know that the places they want to travel are too far for bikes and often too low demand for buses, so the vast majority of them votes for Ms Carington as she promises to fix potholes.
After the election, here are the results:
1. Ms Carington – 38%
2. Mr Busterling – 34%
3. Mrs Bikingale – 28%
However, if we break the vote down by demographics we see:
Urban votes (60% of total votes):
1. Mrs Bikingale – 45%
2. Mr Busterling – 40%
3. Ms Carington – 15%
Rural votes (40% of total votes):
1. Ms Carington – 72.5%
2. Mr Busterling – 25%
3. Mrs Bikingale – 2.5%
In this example, Mrs Bikingale and Mr Busterling were both very popular candidates getting a combined total of 62% of the vote. Only 38% of Littleton wanted Ms Carington as a representative, but because the elections use FTPT, they effectively get 100% of the control (and as such, the government of Littleton will prioritise car owners for the next election cycle).
The fact that both Bikingale and Busterling voters both want alt transport actually hurt them, as they split their combined voting power between two candidates, allowing Carington voters to win the seat. This is the spoiler effect (or at least a big part of it).
Now this is a bit more ELI10, but the reason I included the demographic breakdown is that this is exactly how gerrymandering works. When the electorate borders were drawn, perhaps the independent council drawing them was actually made up of avid motorsports enthusiasts. So they made sure that the Littleton electorate included just enough of the surrounding rural area to ensure that, so long as bus lovers and bike lovers didn’t unify their vote, car lovers would always win.
If one football team scores lots of goals, but loses all their games, then they end up low down in the league. If another football team scores fewer goals, but wins some games, then they end up higher up in the league. The league position depends on how many games you win, not how many goals you score.
Replace “football team” with “political party”, “goals” with “votes”, and “games won” with “constituencies won”, and you have your answer.
This is why we will never have proportional representation. The big Parties are scared of loosing seats. It’s not a fair system but the big Parties don’t want it to change.
I think it’s been explained really well, but I think for me the key is it’s working as designed.
Comparing seats with national votes gives the impression that a party should have more or less seats.
That would be incorrect as first past the post didn’t aim to deliver a proportional number of seats to votes, so it’s not a flaw of FPTP.
It’s the focus on vote share that is the mistake.
The role of an MP in the current system is to represent their constituency and so the most popular candidate from that vote is selected. That sounds pretty sensible.
Because to get a seat you need to win the most votes in that area, they got a upsettingly solid amount of votes overall but only won the most out of any party in 4 seats.
Reform mostly just ended up splitting the right wing vote. Stealing votes away from the Tories instead of convincing non-right people to vote for them. However in almost all constituencies, they were less popular than the Tories, meaning that they didn’t get the seat.
Splitting votes is less of a problem for parties like Lib Dems, as they have their own platform, they aren’t just trying to be more conservative than the conservatives.
Imagine watching the Olympics.
The country at the top of the medal table might have, say, 30 gold medals but no others. Whereas the country in second only have 1 gold medal but have 60 silvers. The country in second has far more medals than the winners, but less golds.
That’s how it is in UK politics – we ONLY care about the gold medal winners. Reform only have 4 seats, but they have LOADS of seats where they were runner up.
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