Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, didn’t I spend some time earlier making it very clear that there was no convincing substantive evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump?
Yes, I did. I’ve also said that we need to avoid letting our biases get the better of us and try and assess everything objectively. So, don’t get upset with me just because it turns out there is very convincing evidence for claims of a stolen Trump election after all.
We’ll get to that soon enough, but first, can we have a squiz at Boris Johnson’s 2019 landslide general election victory in the UK?
In the UK, national elections to the parliament use a system based on constituencies. Basically, the country is split into areas and the people living in those areas vote for one person to represent them.
Currently there are 650 constituencies that each have one Member of Parliament (MP). In theory a party could win every constituency by a single vote. They would have gained just 650 votes more than the next best-performing parties.
Based on a population of 65 million, that’s just 0.001% of the population, but that tiny majority would give them 100% of the seats in parliament. Of course that’s never going to happen, but misrepresentation in relation to how the people voted is quite common.
Let’s consider the 2019 election. The Conservative Party won 42.6% of the votes cast, meaning the majority of voters did not want a Conservative government.1 The result of the vote was that the Conservatives won 365 seats in parliament. That equates to just over 56% of the seats. Despite winning a minority of the votes, they won a majority of the seats.
¯\(°_o)/¯
The Labour Party also did slightly better in terms of seats versus their vote share, though the difference was only marginal. The Scottish National Party was another that did very well from this arrangement too, with their 3.9% vote share equating to 7.38% of the seats. Almost double their vote share.
The most striking result though had to be the Liberal Democrats. The party was voted for by 11.6% of the voters, yet won just 1.69% of the seats. Couldn’t we also explain that as meaning that one in 10 Britons were effectively excluded from choosing who governed them?
That said, the Liberal Democrats had a better outcome in 2024, when they gained 11.1% of the seats, though that was still less than their 12.2% share of the votes.2 Most striking in this election though was how Labour’s 33.7% share of the votes cast resulted in them gaining 62.3% of the seats in parliament. Not so far off twice as many seats as the votes they received. On this occasion, the Conservatives got fewer seats than their vote share, but not by so much, but the big losers appear to be The Reform Party, who got 14.3% of the votes and only 0.8% of the seats.
The UK’s voting system is meant to be democratic, but it barely looks like that when the results don’t reflect the actual votes cast, do they?
Put simply, some people’s votes are worth more than others. How is that fair?
Despite the fact it looks unfair, there are many supporters of this first past-the-post system, largely because it produces a clear and definite result, most of the time anyway. The alternative is to use some form of Proportional Representation (PR) which results in the selection of representatives in proportions that more accurately reflect the way that votes were cast.
The concept of PR isn’t universally loved and it does have some issues. Most commonly it can be seen to lead to less stable governments. Another source of criticism is that it can lead to minority parties with more extreme views gaining a disproportionate amount of power.
That’s just another undesirable side-effect of having such powerful political parties. Because the largest parties after any PR type election tend to have generally opposing ideologies, to form a government, large parties need to rely on smaller parties that are closer in terms of ideology, but often more extreme in their interpretation of that ideology.
There is a very sound argument that says if, for example, 5% of the voters voted for a party, regardless of it having more extreme views, don’t the 5% of voters deserve their voice being heard?
However, the issue tends to be that such small parties can gain a degree of power disproportionate to their share of the vote, as they may be the only way that the larger party can take power.
If parties weren’t so central to our political systems though, there could be a much more sensible way to form governments under PR systems.
Political parties commonly split between left-wing, right-wing and centrist positions. Within any party, there’s usually a broad spread of views among the members.
A politician on the right of a left-wing party could be ideologically closer to a politician in a centrist or right-wing party, than to one on the extreme left of their own party. A similar position could exist for a politician on the left of a right-wing party, being closer to centrist or left-wing politicians, than some on the right of their party. And so on for members of centrist parties.
If membership of political parties was seen as a looser and more fluid association under PR systems, rather than having to form alliances with complete parties, the largest party could seek to just find enough politicians who are closest to their ideology to form a government.
Of course, such a radical idea doesn’t come without problems. There will always be claims of disloyalty, both from politicians and some voters, but are you convinced the current rigid system of political parties is working well for society?
Remember how the poorest 50% of Britons own less than 6% of the wealth while the poorest half of Americans have just 2.5% of the wealth.
Might it not be worth trying something different?
Right now, many politicians across the world see bipartisanism and nonpartisanism as dirty words. They think their main purpose, if they can’t do what they want, is to prevent other parties from doing what they want, regardless of the effect on the people and the world.
Isn’t it time for a reset and for politicians to grow up and start working positively to try and achieve things, rather than negatively and blocking anything they don’t like?
In that kind of world, maybe the concept of politicians working beyond party lines would be less radical. Perhaps, even possible. Though I’d not hold my breath.
The Proof Of Donald Trump’s Stolen Election
Anyhoo, I know you’re just here for Trump, so I promised to share evidence of his stolen election and let’s get to it.
Actually, I’m going to do better than what I promised. I said I’d prove how Trump’s election was stolen, but the reality is that at least five US Presidential elections have been stolen in total, two in this century alone.
We saw that the situation in the UK results from a system that elects a political party to power. In the US it’s different.
US presidential elections are concerned with electing a single person to the position of President. Sure, they’re also electing the Vice President, but clearly no-one really cares about them – there can be no other explanation for Dan Quayle.3
It’s absolutely that simple, the American people are voting for one person.
So how come in the 2000 election, Al Gore received 48.4% of the votes, but George W Bush became president with just 47.9% of the votes?4
More people voted for Gore, but the candidate with half a per cent fewer votes was called the winner. Sure, gaining 0.5% more votes isn’t a huge difference, but it is a difference nonetheless.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 48.2% of the vote, yet Donald Trump became president with just 46.1% of the vote. This time the difference was a more significant 2.1%, yet again the candidate that lost the popular vote, won the election.
Just imagine if it was reported that Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia after receiving 2.1% fewer votes than the opposing candidate. The Western media would be outraged that the autocratic dictator had stolen the election and ignored the will of the Russian people.
How can the American Presidential system be described as democratic? Democracy means government by the people. If more people vote for one candidate, they’re the winner surely?
This demonstrates quite clearly how American society isn’t equal. The vote of some American citizens is worth more than the vote of others.
How can anyone who truly believes in democracy argue that a system that gives greater power to some citizens and takes some power from others is fair?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election#Results ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_election#Results ↩︎
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/post/hilariously-dumb-dan-quayle-quotes and some more at https://www.liveabout.com/dan-quayle-quotes-2733512 ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_in_which_the_winner_lost_the_popular_vote – for clarity, in the 2000 and 2016 elections, there were other candidates which is why those results don’t tally to 100% ↩︎