If you think hard enough you can come up with a situation for any electoral system where this doesn’t work

Boris Johnson announced his departure after an accumulation of scandals. The Tories will name a successor next week who will assume the role of Prime Minister until elections due in January 2025. That seems to make snap elections a thing of the past, although it wouldn’t hurt to take a look to the British electoral system.

UK election results are determined differently than ours. In our House of Representatives elections, it doesn’t matter whether you live in Aadorp or Zwolle: every vote counts equally. The distribution of seats is roughly the same as the voting rate. For example, the VVD won 22.7% of the seats last time out with 21.9% of the votes. The difference between the two percentages was also less than one percentage point for the other parties.

Otherwise in the UK. In the previous election in 2019, the Conservatives won 43.5% of the vote and 56.2% of the seats – a significant difference. (And this while the Tories kept saying after the Brexit referendum that the 48% vote against was best ignored.) What is even more striking is that smaller parties sometimes have more seats than the major parties: for example, the Liberal Democrats won three times as many votes. votes than the Scottish National Party, but the Scottish National Party won more than four times as many seats.

This is due to the constituency system. The country is divided into 650 constituencies: each constituency has only one winner. So you have a majority of 326 ridings. Not all neighborhoods are the same size. The smallest district, Na Na h-Eileanan an Iar in the Scottish Hebrides, had only around 21,000 voters in 2019, while the Isle of Man has 113,000. The 326 smaller districts represent 46% of the population, far less than the 324 largest districts.

In the Netherlands, something similar happens with the elections to the Senate by the members of the Provincial Council: the ratio between the number of deputies and inhabitants is not the same everywhere. This solves the electoral law by working with the numbers of the votes. This solution works rather well, but not perfectly: 1006 Zeelanders have the same voting rights as 1000 Flevolanders. What a pity for the Zeelanders, but the differences are minimal. And with the natural variation in eligible voters, it could be the reverse in the next election.

With these skewed proportions in the UK system, it is possible on paper to get a majority based on a substantial minority of votes, where you Popular vote loses to several others. It’s far-fetched, but theoretically even possible that with a total of only 326 votes you get an absolute majority, while the other parties get 25 million votes: getting a vote in the narrowest majority of constituencies (and the other parties nothing) and by in the other districts not to get a single vote.

Something similar is possible in the Netherlands. Suppose 150 parties participate in the elections. Among these, 149 parties obtain exactly the same number of votes and the 150th a little more. Because the 150th party is the only party to reach the electoral threshold, it could get all the seats (if it weren’t for the fact that parties are not allowed to have more than 80 candidates). A fundamental difference with the British system is that the most popular party also becomes the largest party.

If you think hard enough, you can come up with a situation for any electoral system where the system doesn’t work. It is up to Johnson’s successor, and his political opponents, to ensure that voters still have enough confidence to go to the polls in a few years. Only then will outlandish scenarios remain extremely unlikely.