Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform
moderatecentrist@feddit.uk 5 days agoYes the voting systems of both the UK and US are broken because they’re unrepresentative. Hillary Clinton in 2016 got about 3 million more votes than Trump did. In many countries that would have made her the president. But the anti-democratic electoral college system in the US meant that Trump was made president instead.
jabjoe@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Electoral college isn’t ideal, but the two party system is worse. It’s just red vs blue. My team vs your team. It’s false. Far better as in much of Europe, a sea of parties, coming and going, constantly compromising. That’s a better reflection of real politics.
moderatecentrist@feddit.uk 4 days ago
I think the German system looks pretty good. Their voting system leads to a much more representative legislature. Another example when looking at proportional representation is the Netherlands, but their system seems to lead to lots of lengthy coalition negotiations and squabbling before they form a government.
Germany, for much of the last 20 years, has had a coalition government between the big centre-right and big centre-left blocs. E.g. in the 2005 election, 69.4% of voters backed either the Union or SPD, who together made up the subsequent coalition government. Compare that to the UK where we have a Labour government who, whether you like them or not, were only voted for by 33.7% of voters.
jabjoe@feddit.uk 3 days ago
More often it is Conservatives, also on about a third of the vote, and that has deeply broken the country, but I take your point.
I’d like score/rank voting based mixed member.
moderatecentrist@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Yes the same issue has brought about Conservative governments. In 2015 the Tories got only 36.8% of the vote but this gave them 50.8% of the seats.
I will admit that I don’t know the details of the different kinds of proportional voting. As long as a system would result in a House of Commons that more accurately and proportionately reflects voters, I think that would be a good thing