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The Scottish National Party (SNP), with 4.7% of the vote, won 56 seats. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), with 12.6% of the vote — 3.7 million voters who took the time and trouble to go to the polls and mark their ballots for their party of choice — got just one seat. The Liberal Democrats fared scarcely better: 7.9% of the vote, eight seats. Neither did the Greens: 3.8% of the vote, one seat. All told, these three parties, with nearly a quarter of the popular vote between them, won 10 seats in a 650-seat House.

This discrepancy is not coincidental, random or unusual. It happens nearly every election, and in much the same way: parties whose support is bunched regionally, like the SNP, are hugely favoured, at the expense of broadly based parties like UKIP or the Lib-Dems. We’ve seen much the same phenomenon here, notably in the success of the Bloc Québécois: parties that emphasize ethnic and regional grievances and insist on the irreconcilable differences between themselves and their compatriots of other tribes are rewarded for their belligerence. While those grievances and differences may be real, the electoral map exaggerates them, painting a false and distorted picture of the country.

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Well, that much you are probably aware of. Nearly everyone can agree that’s a problem. What’s more insidious about first past the post are the many other of its bizarre aspects we take for granted, as part of the normal operations of democracy — or at worst as endearing quirks — that are in fact simply a function of the electoral system. As we prepare for the federal election, for example, my media colleagues are gearing up to report on the so-called “battleground” ridings or provinces, the ones — often a small handful — where the election will actually be decided. How’s that again? Don’t they all count in the final result? Isn’t every riding a “battleground”?