The other way

One of the advantages - some say the only advantage - in a general election month is that everything else stops happening. The saturation coverage of elections manages to marginalise almost everything else that's still going on, and only the apposite intervention  of a volcano provides any relief from the otherwise wall-to-wall, excruciating monotony only merciless dissection of minutiae can provide.

So, in the true, boring-you-to death-about-the-election spirit, here're some interesting facts: the UK is one of only a few governments to use the first-past-the-post voting system, or 'Plurality' voting system.

 If more than two parties with substantial support contest a constituency, as is typical in Canada, India and the UK, a candidate does not have to get anything like 50 per cent of the votes to win, so a majority of votes are "lost".

Dividing a nation into bite-sized chunks for an election is itself a fraught business that invites other distortions, too. A party can win outright by being only marginally ahead of its competitors in most electoral divisions. In the UK general election in 2005, the ruling Labour party won 55 per cent of the seats on just 35 per cent of the total votes. If a party is slightly ahead in a bare majority of electoral divisions but a long way behind in others, they can win even if a competitor gets more votes overall - as happened most notoriously in recent history in the US presidential election of 2000, when George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore.

The anomalies of a plurality voting system can be more subtle, though, as mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California, Irvine, showed. Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk (M), beer (B), or wine (W). Six rank them M-W-B, five B-W-M, and four W-B-M. In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40 per cent of the vote, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last.

So do voters actually prefer milk? Not a bit of it. Nine voters prefer beer to milk, and nine prefer wine to milk - clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile, 10 people prefer wine to beer. By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M - the exact reverse of what the voting system produced. In fact Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire.

So there you have it.  All voting systems are notoriously flawed, doomed to failure and inevitably lead to the wrong party and candidates being elected.

But all this overlooks one simple fact: we don't need MPs at all.  The country functions perfectly well during their lengthy summer breaks, bank holidays and other times when the house isn't in session. That's because the executive minds the shop and generally follows established protocols. It's true MPs were needed years ago, because asking everyone's opinion on every issue was impossible. But a lot has changed, even in ten years. It's now technically achievable and thus perfectly feasible for everyone in the UK to vote when asked on a law.  The internet has made that possible.  That means anyone could put together a law they liked, submit via the internet to the public, who could then vote and pass it into law. 

Of course, you'd need some sort of organisational committee structure, but the members of that could be elected in the same way, and dismissed just as easily.

Wonder why our MPs like to keep things the way they are…