Voting

 Fair Vote -  Like American elections, British elections use single-choice voting, where the candidate with the most votes wins even if they receive a small plurality of the vote. Yet unlike Americans, who overwhelmingly vote for one of the two major parties, British voters often split their votes across many different parties. The latest British election helps illustrate how single-choice voting often produces unrepresentative results when voters have more than two choices on the ballot. The Labour Party won 411 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, which is over 63% of the seats. However, Labour candidates won just 34% of the vote nationally, the largest gap between a winning party’s vote and seat share in British history. Unrepresentative elections aren’t new for the United Kingdom. In the 21 British elections since 1945, there have been 18 in which a party won a majority of seats without a majority votes. Notably, in 2015, the Conservative Party won a majority of seats with only 37% of the vote.