Vote share paints a different picture of election results
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Version 0 of 1. Letters: Readers point out that the first past the post system distorts the scale of Labour’s electoral losses and the extent of the Conservative party’s popularity In last week’s election, candidates for remain-supporting parties received 16.5 million votes, while candidates for leave-supporting parties received 14.8 million. The 14.8 million gave the leave supporters a majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons. We may infer two facts from these numbers: our electoral system is grossly undemocratic, and there is no majority in the UK for leaving the EU. The first fact has made the second irrelevant. How is this tolerable?Prof AC Grayling London • Your editorial is correct that Labour’s “203 seats is its lowest total since 1935 … Labour has lost more than 50% of the seats it won in 2001” (14 December). But it’s also true that Labour received only 455,000 fewer votes in 2019 than 18 years earlier (10,269,076 in 2019 compared with 10,724,953 in 2001). Labour also secured significantly more votes in this year’s election than in 2005, 2010 and 2015. It’s certainly the case that Jeremy Corbyn led his party to a bitter defeat. But under the first-past-the-post system the number of seats won or lost alone can be a deceptive measure of the scale of success or failure. Joe McCarthyDublin • Yes, of course it is right to analyse the reasons for the “crushing disappointment” the Lib Dems suffered (A bruised party pausing to map out a new bearing, 19 December), but nowhere in this article is there mention of the fact that the Lib Dems suffered their reduction in seats despite a 4% increase in vote share. Meanwhile, barely a 1% increase delivers both the Tories and the SNP a landslide. And this is democracy, apparently.Mary SmithMaidstone, Kent • Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com • Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters • Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition |