Election Reflections
There are two big problems with the UK election process. First, you don’t get to vote for the government like you do in the USA. Rather, you vote for your local member of parliament and its the total of MPs that determines who gets to choose the prime minister. So you might desperately want a Liberal Democrat government but your local LibDem candidate might be a loser or, in many cases, there might not even be in your area to vote for. So do you vote tactically or for who will do the best job for your city?
The second problem is that the result is determined using the first past the post system. The winner of each constituency is chosen by the person with the most votes. And then the government is chosen by whoever gets the most consituency victories. It has become a pattern for each party to promise to switch the election voting to proportional representation but it has never happened: once elected the winning party quickly realises that they would never have been elected under that scheme and so the idea is shelved until the next time…