UK Politics

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UK general election: find your new constituency – and see how it would have voted in 2019 (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

The Labour vote share in my already Labour stronghold has increased? What the fuck? This isn't how it's supposed to work. I was told this was an evil plan by the Tories and the Electoral Commission. FFS!

Jokes aside, my constituency has and always will be Labour by some margin. This has increased it at the expense of Green and LidDem votes. Interestingly the Tory share has also increased but not by as much as Labour.

What is the word for Gerrymandering when it benefits / costs all parties uniformly in the same way according to well understood population statistics?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

That's exactly what gerrymandering looks like, though - group all the labour votes into one weirdly shaped constituency and leave the other 10 in the area solid blue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

The Labour vote share in my already Labour stronghold has increased? What the fuck? This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. I was told this was an evil plan by the Tories and the Electoral Commission. FFS!

I am not making any comment on how disreputable these changes are but what you're seeing is exactly what you'd expect if the Tories were trying to load the dice. Gerrymandering can't disappear votes. It has to pack as many opposition votes as possible into as few constituencies as possible, leaving narrow wins for the gerrymanderer in all the remaining ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

They analysis shows that, were the last election fought on the new constituency boundaries, the Conservative majority would be 14 seats larger. It also reveals that the swing to Labour required for the party to achieve an overall majority increases by 0.7 percentage points from 12.0 to 12.7.

So this is less representative. However, you'd be hard pushed to find anything that really looks like clear gerrymandering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

All those additional votes come from areas that were labour but by a smaller margin, meaning they are likely to be Tory next election. Think about it.

Combined with the new photo id law and you have classical voter disenfranchisement.