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The Ultimate Postcode Lottery

We talk about postcode lotteries for health provision and schooling but never before have we been able to see how much our Electoral system is one too.  Martin and I created the Voter Power website to enable individual voters to see how much their vote really counts – the data was based on a report I did after the last General Election called Spoiled Ballot.  But I hadn’t really appreciated till I have been talking to journalists this week is just how locally unjust this whole system is.  Here’s an example.

You can have near neighbours in slightly different postcodes – say someone in Bootle and nearby Sefton Central – both on Merseyside - and yet they have wildly different potentials to influence the election results.  Why is this? Well in Bootle over 70% of votes were for Labour making it one of the safest seats in the UK.  Whereas in Sefton Central – a newly drawn constituency for this election – the make up of voters suggest a much closer race between all three of the major parties.  The VPI puts figures on these differences and shows that the Sefton voter – who remember lives just down the road from the Bootle one – has over 100x more power.  Crazy hey!

To return to the health analogy – this is just like one neighbour getting a hip replacement within a  month and the other having to wait over eight years!  We wouldn’t accept that would we!

Nic

Nic Marks, nef (the new economics foundation), creator of the Voter Power Index

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 8:20 am and is filed under Voter Power Index. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Ant
    Thank you for this website has confirmed what we have always thought that our votes go un-answered, not only are they worthless but the parties who are in power change the boundaries to suite their needs, now stop me if im wrong but this is vote rigging right? we need PR then the useless money grabbing mp's will be forced to actually work for our benefit and not their own,

    my vote power by the way is not even point 1 of a % absolutely ridiculous if there is no vote reform after the election, we will all be needed to protest this unjust system

    no longer can we sit in ignorance of whats going on.
  • Kento Crosby
    My street has been transferred into Bootle from Crosby (now Sefton Central) so my vote is now worthless compared to my brother 200 yds away who remains in the former marginal constituency.

    The problem is the making of the Conservative and Labour parties who continually reject all proposals to introduce a democratic electoral system in the UK.

    I feel the time has come to organise a protest by asking all those in Safe Seats to not vote. The resultant poor turnout would then demonstrate to the politicians the contempt the public have for this situation which is only devised to give Labour & Conservative parties safe tenure for a core of their most valued MPs and the 'winner' a substantial working majority even though they might have been elected by a minority popular vote.
  • Schroduck
    We just recently fell victim to a small boundary change that bumped us from Leeds North West (voter power 0.605) to Leeds Central (voter power 0.015). At a stroke of a pen, the power of our vote just dropped 40-fold!
  • Lawrie Schonfelder
    Any system based on one member constituencies has this property. Sush systems only choose governments due to the accidents of boundary placements and the non-uniform distribution of support for the parties. After all, if support was uniform one party would get 100% of the seats, regardless of the voting system.
    Constitutionally what we are doing is choosing a local representative but this has been fiction for centuries. Even as a mechanism for choosing a local representative first past the post is a terrible system as, except in a few extra "safe" seats, the winning candidate rarely is supported by more than half the voters. AV, which has been used in Australia since 1901, at least ensures that the winner is preferred by more than 50% of the voters.
    We need reform!
  • johnbrockbank
    I have voted in every single local authority, county council, general, election and all by elections since 1964. I have never voted for any candidate who has come higher than third. This time our constituency is a new one and fior the first time there is a small chance that my party will come second but if as expected the Lioberal democrats do well, my party will once again come third.

    OK, so that happens because I am fairly well off and live in staunch Conservative areas.

    My voting has always been a waste of time.

    More seriously, we hae been ruled over for my whole life by a party which most people have voted against. This can not be a healthy situation for a democracy.

    What is going to happen now is that the Conservaives will win and if they have not an absolute majority they will just call another election as soon as they are far enough ahead in the polls - that ill be later this year if their lead is big enough and in a couple of years if they make boundary changes first.
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