There was just an election in the UK for the European Parliament (to elect MEPs), and it was interesting in the news because of the rise of one particular party, UKIP. The European elections use a proportional representation method, which UK general elections don't, so this doesn't mean that there will be a corresponding rise in UKIP members of parliament (at present, 0) at the next general election.
I voted in the London constituency, which has 8 MEPs elected in one ballot.
Wikipedia has a list of number of votes and number of MEPs elected, for each party.
Both the Green Party and UKIP got the same number of MEPs: 1 each. But their vote count was very different (371,133 for UKIP vs 196,419 for the Greens), and the liberal democrats, traditionally the third party in UK politics, got no seats at all.
I found myself playing with some "what-if" scenarios to better understand how the results came out.
The vote works like this: each elector chooses one choice on the ballot paper from a list of chosen parties - there were 17 parties on the paper, mostly small, fairly irrelevant ones.
The votes for each party are tallied, giving a vote count for each party.
Then, it is necessary to convert that vote count into a set of 8 MEPs that broadly reflects the proportion of votes. This is done here with the D'Hondt method which as an intermediate step needs a two-dimensional table. I'm going to omit the smaller parties here because they don't have an effect on my scenarios.
| Party | Count | /1 | /2 | /3 | /4 | /5 | /6 | /7 | /8 | /9 | /10 | /11 | /12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 806959 | 806959 (1) | 403479 (3) | 268986 (5) | 201739 (7) | 161391 (11) | 134493 | 115279 | 100869 | 89662 | 80695 | 73359 | 67246 |
| Conservative | 495639 | 495639 (2) | 247819 (6) | 165213 (10) | 123909 | 99127 | 82606 | 70805 | 61954 | 55071 | 49563 | 45058 | 41303 |
| UKIP | 371133 | 371133 (4) | 185566 (9) | 123711 | 92783 | 74226 | 61855 | 53019 | 46391 | 41237 | 37113 | 33739 | 30927 |
| Green | 196419 | 196419 (8) | 98209 | 65473 | 49104 | 39283 | 32736 | 28059 | 24552 | 21824 | 19641 | 17856 | 16368 |
| LibDem | 148013 | 148013 (12) | 74006 | 49337 | 37003 | 29602 | 24668 | 21144 | 18501 | 16445 | 14801 | 13455 | 12334 |
So the 8 seats were chosen as the top 8 "votes / seats" quotients. Those are coloured yellow in the table. I've also numbered the winning positions and the next 4 after that in order of "votes / seats".
So there's a difference there between the Greens and UKIP: UKIP was chosen 4th, with a solid block of votes to get its single seat. The greens were chosen last, and only just got a seat.
What do I mean by "only just"? Well, the next seat allocated if not for the Greens would have been a second UKIP seat (numbered 9 in the table) and to get that they would have needed 2 * 196419 = 392838 votes to beat the Greens: 21706 votes more than they actually got.
Or conversely, if the greens had got less than 185566 votes (so 10853 less than they really got), they would have taken 9th place, behind a 2nd UKIP seat taking the 8th seat. If that was the case, then the table would have looked like this:
| Party | Count | /1 | /2 | /3 | /4 | /5 | /6 | /7 | /8 | /9 | /10 | /11 | /12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 806959 | 806959 (1) | 403479 (3) | 268986 (5) | 201739 (7) | 161391 (11) | 134493 | 115279 | 100869 | 89662 | 80695 | 73359 | 67246 |
| Conservative | 495639 | 495639 (2) | 247819 (6) | 165213 (10) | 123909 | 99127 | 82606 | 70805 | 61954 | 55071 | 49563 | 45058 | 41303 |
| UKIP | 371133 | 371133 (4) | 185566 (8) | 123711 | 92783 | 74226 | 61855 | 53019 | 46391 | 41237 | 37113 | 33739 | 30927 |
| Green | 185565 | 185565 (9) | 92782 | 61855 | 46391 | 37113 | 30927 | 26509 | 23195 | 20618 | 18556 | 16869 | 15463 |
| LibDem | 148013 | 148013 (12) | 74006 | 49337 | 37003 | 29602 | 24668 | 21144 | 18501 | 16445 | 14801 | 13455 | 12334 |
Another thing that I think is interesting is just how badly the Lib Dems did. To get a seat, all other votes being equal, they'd have needed to get up to that 196419 to steal the 8th place off the Greens: that is 196419 - 148013 = 48406 more votes, 32% more than they actually got.
A different way of looking at that is considering if there were more than 8 seats, how many more seats would there need to be for the Lib Dems to get a seat to represent their proportion (about 6%) of the electorate?
The numbers in the first table above beyond 8 show that: the Lib Dems are 12th in line for a seat, after This table shows the 11 yellow coloured seats ahead of the lib dems, one more seat for each of Labour, the Conservatives, and UKIP.
| Party | Count | /1 | /2 | /3 | /4 | /5 | /6 | /7 | /8 | /9 | /10 | /11 | /12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 806959 | 806959 (1) | 403479 (3) | 268986 (5) | 201739 (7) | 161391 (11) | 134493 | 115279 | 100869 | 89662 | 80695 | 73359 | 67246 |
| Conservative | 495639 | 495639 (2) | 247819 (6) | 165213 (10) | 123909 | 99127 | 82606 | 70805 | 61954 | 55071 | 49563 | 45058 | 41303 |
| UKIP | 371133 | 371133 (4) | 185566 (9) | 123711 | 92783 | 74226 | 61855 | 53019 | 46391 | 41237 | 37113 | 33739 | 30927 |
| Green | 196419 | 196419 (8) | 98209 | 65473 | 49104 | 39283 | 32736 | 28059 | 24552 | 21824 | 19641 | 17856 | 16368 |
| LibDem | 148013 | 148013 (12) | 74006 | 49337 | 37003 | 29602 | 24668 | 21144 | 18501 | 16445 | 14801 | 13455 | 12334 |
So many election tea-leaves for staring into in this election!
You can get the Haskell code on GitHub that produced the above tables, if you want to fiddle yourself.
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