You could make an argument, not necessarily a good one, that in France 2017 Emmanuel Macron (whose En Marche! party was only founded in April 2016) won the Presidency based on only 23.75 per cent of the vote, due to having the luck that second place went to Marine Le Pen with 21.5% generally considered to be unelectable in the second round.
Even if the election had ended there (declaring him winner and not going to the second round) it would still not be as “undemocratic” as the situation the electoral college causes. Most people would agree that if person A got more votes than person B then person A won the election, whether that was 99% to 1% or 24% to 22%. Yeah 1st-past-the-post has it’s issues (hence why it DIDN’T end there) but that’s still the case.
The situation in the US in 2000 and 2016 was totally different it wasn’t just that the vote was split so the winning party didn’t have over %50 (that does happen in the US, remember) it was that person A got more votes than person B, but it was person B that got to form a government.
I am actually interested in hearing the answer to the OP. I can’t think of any other legitimate liberal democracy, where that has happened, but that doesn’t mean there are none.
In a single electorate, yes.
When you have multiple electorates with different numbers of votes and/or representatives returned then all permutations are feasible.
You obviously haven’t been paying attention to the contributions from virtually all non-merkins in innumerable threads on this topic over the life of SDMB
In Australia (just one of many legitimate liberal democracies) the party which wins the most seats (for the US read EC votes) forms government. Whether they got a national majority of primary votes or 2-party preferred votes or not is a curiosity of cosmetic importance.
Over the past century of Australian Federal elections there have been 7 instances where the party/coalition which formed government has won less primary votes than the opposition, about 15%.
29 May 1954 election
9 December 1961 election
25 October 1969 election
11 July 1987 election
24 March 1990 election
3 October 1998 election
We don’t get burned up about it. Why so many merkin posters seem to, I’m buggered if I know.
Those are the rules and everybody knows those are the rule before the election is called.
If you don’t like the rules then, you know, via the democratic process change 'em.
Which begs the question what is it about the Australian system that makes it so prone to this happening? (even more than the US electoral college) The UK does not, neither does any other parliamentary system (that I know of, though I didn’t know this happened in Oz until about 2 minutes ago).
And is there some deliberate reason for it being set up that way? (the electoral college in the US was setup deliberately constrain the power of the abolitionist northern states, as has been discussed here ad naseum)
Seems to me it just happens that way. If the Coalition wins 76 seats by one vote and loses 74 by 10000, they form government with significantly less votes. So that might be what happens from time to time, though obviously far less extreme.
Australia uses Alternative Vote for lower house elections, kind of like an immediate second ballot system. Smaller parties are eliminated and second choices are counted until a candidate gets a majority in a seat.
It’s easy to see how such a system could inflate the seat-count of a party more than FPTP.
It’s one of the reasons I voted No to electoral reform in the UK in 2011. I still don’t understand why Clegg accepted it.
The UK system is *exactly like *the Austrailian system in this regard. If party A wins the most seats in Parliament, they form the government. Even if Party B had far *more *total votes on a national scale.
What matters is win or lose in each individual constituency. That’s it. Nothing more. In effect the people vote for their local reps. The reps in turn “vote”, by dint of their count per party, for which party forms the government.
As **penultimate thule **said, the national total is a purely cosmetic number. That’s true in the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, and NZ off the top of my head. It’s going to be true in substantially any parliamentary system with a weak / ceremonial presidency and a non-proportional rep selection system.
I certainly agree, as I’ve said up-thread, that a darn good argument can be made that within the US system at least this election method is the evil spawn of an evil bargain. And one that’s well past overdue to be replaced by a direct national popular vote.
But we’re not there today.
My bottom line: There are lots of good arguments against the US EC. That it is somehow an unusual system is not one of them. Instead it’s a (the?)commonplace system.
True. What matters in the Australian electoral system is not the primary vote but what is termed the two-party preferred vote i.e. after the allocation of preferences.
Even so there have been seven elections where the party winning the two-party-preferred vote didn’t win the most seats. (the list is different to the post above which was based on primary votes).
However, you’ll notice they are all very close elections.
…ALP… L+NP
21 September 1940 election (L+NP win) 50.30% 49.70%
29 May 1954 election (L+NP win) 50.70% 49.30%
9 December 1961 election (L+NP win) 50.50% 49.50%
25 October 1969 election (L+NP win) 50.20% 49.80%
24 March 1990 election (ALP win) 49.90% 50.10%
3 October 1998 election (L+NP win) 51.00% 49.00%
21 August 2010 election (L+NP win) 50.10% 49.90%
But it’s more a simple case of demographics. The ALP support is in the inner city electorates which tend to have higher populations than the rural electorates where NP support is strongest.
Lowest polling candidates are eliminated first, not necessarily the smaller parties.
There is a greater proportion of minor party/independent members elected under preference voting into the Australian federal parliament than are in the UK parliament under FPTP.
In theory, but this has never happened. There have been occasions (actually only one I think) where multiple minority parties have formed a government ahead of the “winning” party, but the coalition still represented a majority of voters, so that still was not as undemocratic the electoral college.
In the those examples from Australia, not only was the winning party (by number of voters) not included in the winning coalition, but the winning coalition still represented less voters than the losing party even though they represented more seats.
Yeah but actually it has a couple of times in the past century.
You win an election by accumulating a majority of seats/electorates in the parliament.
How many votes on a national basis that takes is an irrelevance.
It’s not that complex a concept.
Look up rotten boroughs some time.
It seems to do it less often in the UK than in Aus, and I suspect that the reasons are to do with the distribution of high-constituent vs low-constituent seats by party.
In Australia (and the US, I think) low-constituent seats tend to be rural, therefore tend to the right-ish wing, therefore it’s easier in a close race for the Coalition (or Republicans, in the US case) to squeak in a seat majority with a slight minority of the electorate. And in fact, I think all but one of your listed minority proportion->majority seats elections went in favour of the Coalition, and haven’t all the similar US instances favoured the Republicans?
In the UK this effect is balanced out by the fact that some of the lowest-constituent seats are in Scotland, and Scotland tends very left, comparatively. And in fact half your cited close elections in the UK went to Labour, and half to the Tories.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of other countries which have a substantial rural left-leaning population (though there are a lot of countries in the world, and I might just be ignorant…)
I suspect you are right on the money.
The West’s definitions don’t really work but my understanding would be that in India the Congress would classified as centre-left and it’s support has tended to be more from the rural areas.
I’m not familiar with the situation in South America but a similar dynamic (urban = right, rural = left) might apply there also.
I would have thought the Reform Act of 1832 might have had some effect after almost 200 years, but YYMV.
If reading up on these times of political reform isn’t an option a very handy potted summary can be gained from “Blackadder the Third” episode 1 Dish & Dishonestywhere Blackadder conspires to have Baldrick elected to the rotten borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold.
Rural societies have one foot in the feudal system , a society based on agriculture, whereas capitalism arose in the cities. All over the globe, you find the pattern of conservatism in the countryside and a more modern world view in the cities.
Japan has a system which favors the conservative rural areas
“Rural Tottori has roughly 240,000 voters per representative. Tokyo has more than a million per representative.”
Leaving aside Congressional issues, a very simple way to make U.S. Presidential elections both fairer and more representative would be to require all 50 states to follow Maine and Nebraska’s example and abolish the “winner-takes-all” approach of apportioning the entirety of a state’s electors to whichever party wins a simple majority, which the other 48 states currently follow.
Whatever you think of American race relations, it’s correct to say that the apartheid-era South African political system did overweight certain portions of the (white) electorate as opposed to other portions, and this was key to the National Party’s parliamentary success in at least two elections (they got fewer votes nationwide by a large margin, but won a majority of seats). In this way we have something in common with them.
Um, it’s a not uncommon pattern in Latin America that rural areas lean left and cities lean right.
The base of support for Chavez was always in the rural areas, as was the base of support for Ollanta Humala in Peru (you can see that in the 2006 election map). Caracas and Lima leaned strongly right wing.
Same pattern might be true in Brazil although the election results there seem to reflect more of a regional rather than rural-urban split, with the poorer areas in the north and northeast leaning towards Rousseff and the south leaning towards the right.