One year on: 9 things you need to know about the 2019 General Election electoral-reform.org.uk/9-things-you-n…
1. The Conservatives won a big majority… despite only increasing their vote share by 1.3% on 2017
2. Smaller parties got crushed – as usual. Nearly 900,000 votes for the Green Party across the UK equated to exactly one Green MP.

In contrast, it took just 25,000 or so votes to elect an SNP MP (thankfully, both parties back proportional representation!)
3. The ERS predicted with 100% accuracy the result in the majority (56%) of England’s seats – 300 of them – before polling day

For the 16 million-plus voters in these seats, it may have felt like there was barely an election happening at all
4. Around 14.5 million voters are unrepresented across the UK (they didn’t pick the one winner in each seat)

That’s a marked contrast to proportional representation, where we'd end one-party-takes-all results at last
5. Nearly one in three people (30%) are likely to have voted tactically, according to BMG polling for the ERS.

That means millions of people were forced to try and game the system. Often, the many tactical voting sites contradicted each other
6. Safe seat voters got left out. Voters in swing seats reported receiving far more leaflets than those in Britain’s hundreds of safe seats, according to research for the ERS

Frankly, it’s seen as not worthwhile for some parties to campaign in ultra-safe seats
7. The 2019 election result might look quite different if seats matched votes and everyone’s voice was heard.

The PR, the Conservatives would still have been the largest party – they got the most votes. But they would not have an undeserved majority of seats
8. One in six seats in the Commons are effectively ‘unearned’ under Westminster’s warped voting system

Last December’s election saw a return to deeply disproportionate results
Nearly 75,000 people signed our petition for proportional representation after the election action.electoral-reform.org.uk/page/3782/peti…

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More from @electoralreform

24 Sep
Democracy in the Dark – our new report from two of the UK’s leading election finance academics Dr @KateDommett
and Dr @sampower reveals a major rise in online spending during the 2019 general election – with little transparency over how it was used.
electoral-reform.org.uk/ers-reveals-th…
The £19.5 million the Conservatives raised in the six weeks leading up to the election is greater than the sum total of reported donations to all political parties in 2017 during the same period (Chart: Weekly pre-poll donations over £7,500)
2019 saw big donors that were far more willing to part with their cash than in 2017 – the total reported donations in the run up to the vote topped £30.4 million (All parties, donations over £7,500).
Read 7 tweets
8 Sep
Hereditary peer by-elections, ludicrous elections where there are sometimes more candidates then voters, were paused during lockdown - peers have now quietly extended the pause hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2020-09-…
Lord Newby: 'Elections were postponed in May and no local council by-elections are being held. If the only election at this point was the hereditary peers by-election in the House of the Lords, it would make us look even more foolish — if that were possible — than we already do'
It's absurd that we guarantee aristocrats seats-for-life in the 21st century. The by-elections must be scrapped as a stepping stone to real reform
Read 4 tweets
20 Aug
In the US, Black Americans and voters of color are less likely than whites to hold the required ID to vote and therefore are more burdened by voter ID laws, multiple studies have found.
businessinsider.com/voter-identifi…
Rules started to come in in the mid-2010s and 2020s, with claims that such laws were justified to prevent in-person voter impersonation, a type of voter fraud that multiple comprehensive studies have found is vanishingly rare to the point of being almost non-existent.
A 2014 study from Loyola University Law School professor and elections scholar Justin Levitt, for example, found just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2014, a time period during which over one billion votes were cast.
Read 4 tweets
13 Aug
An analysis of the many failings of the House of Lords newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
There are some shocking stats in this report -since April 2019, one peer only spoke three times - once to suggest invading Zimbabwe and once about a particularly good breakfast. Nevertheless, he signed in 108 times out of the 113 sitting days and collected £30,361
Three life peers claimed more than £29,000 in attendance fees and travel expenses for attending no debates, sitting on no committees and voting in less than half the listed divisions in that period, despite signing in for more than 90 days
Read 5 tweets
4 Jun
Good news that the government has now agreed to maintain some form of remote contributions during the pandemic, following pressure from MPs, voters and campaigners
At-risk MPs will now be able to contribute to Commons questions remotely, and clinically vulnerable MPs able to proxy vote. Welcome concessions!
Of course, the easier and safer option would have been to maintain remote voting/speaking for the duration of the pandemic. But this is an improvement on what previously looked like a full shut-down of virtual proceedings
Read 5 tweets
2 Jun
NEW: @darrenhughesnz on gov't plans to scrap remote participation this AM:

“Cutting off all remote participation without provision for shielding MPs risks leaving representatives locked out, and millions of voters made voiceless"
.@darrenhughesnz: "Proposals for ‘kilometre queues’ are absurd and unnecessary when digital voting has worked well. Both the Procedure Committee & opposition have put forward sensible amendments today to ensure democratic participation is protected and address major concerns"
It's senseless to stop remote participation while the pandemic still rages.

We call on the government to listen to the concerns of the Procedure Committee, shielding MPs, equality groups, and voters to avoid turning this into a rump Parliament with cores of MPs excluded
Read 4 tweets

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