as if we always get one man, one vote here in the U.S.... (see Senate and Electoral College)

Canada has the same screwed up system as the British...

History and geography are to blame. I still predict a tory majority.

The Liberals, Conservatives and Labour have all gained power via the current system and never bothered trying to change it at the time. As much as I enjoy blaming Labour for as many cock-ups and dodgy acts as I can, it's not really their fault any more than anyone else's.

Assuming we get a hung parliament I can't see first past the post laster much longer, however. The Lib Dems will demand PR as the price for their support.

Well, the United States has a federal system of government, and the states are legitimate, popular units of that system. The Senate represents the people of the state as citizens of that state, not as individuals. The intent of the Senate is to represent the people of that state at large.

House districts are specifically made to have the same amount of people in each district since it represents the people directly. Since the UK isn't a federal entity the House of Commons would represent the people like the House of Representatives does here, so why can Commons constituencies have varying populations?

Constituencies are roughly the same size as each other but the accuracy of this is impaired by two conditions that the British have decided to impose
1) They don't want to be always changing constituency borders (if you were to do this perfectly you'd have to redraw the borders when you called the election, or else every time someone moved house across a border)
2) They want the constituencies to mean something in terms of local communities so it is considered advantageous if the borders are natural in some way (using, for example, county or other administrative borders, or natural borders such as rivers). To get it absolutely right you'd need to take completely arbitrary borders.
It may be that even within these conditions it's possible to do better but it's certainly not possibly to get perfectly equal sized constituencies.

Sure it is. Every rep represents every one, like county commissioners here in the states. They don't represent districts, but the entire county and the entire county votes for all the seats. No districting required.

That changes the notion of the representative rather. It would mean that instead of 100000 people electing "their" representative, some larger group would elect some representatives. This is done to some extent with the elections of MEPs for the European parliament.
If I've understood correctly (and I may not have done), however, the country still needs to be cut up into counties and doing that would have the same problems as I outlined above if all the counties were to be of the same size (or even if they were all to be integer multiples of the same size if we assume that not all counties need to elect the same number of commissioners)

But then someone in a constituency with 100,000 people is less represented than another in a 70,000 person constituency. I realize Britain has about 200 more MP than we have Congressmen, but that's still a disparity which I don't think is fair.

I'm not trying to claim fairness - I'm trying to explain that it is not possible to split Britain (or any real country) into consituencies of equal size without changing something that is valued by the British - either the notion of one MP for one constituency or the "naturalness" of the borders or the infrequency of border changes. It can't be done.
We can argue that it would be better to forego one of these in order to have greater fairness or we can argue that they could get closer to fairness if they tried harder (that might be tricky to demonstrate) but we can't just say "It's not perfect therefore they should make it better".

At the federal level/commons and lords level, there has to be some division, sure. But as has been pointed out, our division in the Senate is done by smaller, self-governing entities called states. Within those states, there are also division of their State senates called counties. But counties have their own level of autnomy as well and don't get divided.

Of course, this natrually leans towards an unbalanced senate as counties or states with larger populations have less voice per person than smaller ones by populace. This is balanced in the house of representatives at both levels which has the same district redrawing issues as you all have. What I'm proposing is a house of representatives where everyone votes for all the members and the members don't represent a district, but the entire country at large. It would be like our Presidential election in that the President and VP don't represent just DC or just some corner of the backwaters of my home state, but the entire American people. So have a popular vote for say 11 people who all campaign and run enmasse and the top 11 vote-getters get the seats.

Actually if you thought it was unfair and you wanted to do something about it you'd have two reasonable lines of action open to you.
1) Stand as an MP and vote to get the system changed
2) Move to a smaller constituency and take advantage of being one of 70000 rather than 100000 (I believe a similar approach was taken by the good folks of Kansas and Nebraska in the mid 19th century - let's do that, it seemed to work out well!)

Oh, and make it a true democracy, so electoral college crap. Just like your typical election of county commissioners and have the seats "rotate" as to when they come up so that every 4 or 6 years all the seats have been up for election and a portion go up every year or every other year.

Make a seat be good for 3 years and have 3 seats go up every year for a total of 9 seats...

@Draugnar. What you suggest is essentially a perfect proportional representation model (one which isn't followed by your presidential elections which I guess you know but wasn't clear from your post). As I understand it there are two big drawbacks to that
i) People like having a "local" representative that they can claim to know somethign about rather than a share in a group of national politicians
ii) Single issue parties would get a much greater voice and, as it would be unlikely that a single party would have an overall majority, would, in fact, have an unfairly powerful voice in that they could sell their vote to whoever did most for their issue. The primary requirement of a political system is not that it's "fair" but that it delivers good government; clearly if you can get both that's advantageous.

Draugnar, proportional representation at the federal level is illegal and I would suspect also unconstitutional.

When you say it's illegal, presumably you're saying that the method of electing representatives is laid down in some kind of law. Isn't that obvious? In order to change the method of election you have to change the law - at that point it would stop being illegal. When you say it's unconstitutional all you're saying is that the law in question is slightly more difficult to change. I don't think it will come as a surprise to Draugnar to learn that he can't change the way the American Democracy works by writing down what he considers a good idea in a forum on the webdiplomacy site (although that approach to government would have its charms, I'm sure)

@Invictus - Proprotional representation at the federal level is called the Hosue of Representatives where they attempt to blanace districts so that each representative represents roughly the same percentage of population. There is nothing illegal in it. And Parallel is right in that I have no doubt the idea of representation en masse at the Federal level would never happen because we'd have to change the Constitution to alter how the House is elected. It also isn't feasible to have a popular election of 200 million plus potential voters. Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea. It works well at the county level and could work with better and more reliable polling tools at the national level too. But again, I'm not deluded into thinking a Constitutional Amendment would ever happen to allow it.

@Invictus: the rebalancing of House districts is a recent phenomenon created by liberal activist judges who created a system not envisioned by the founders. If you're a strict constructionist, you would say that each state has the right to allocate their representation as they see fit, even if they disenfranchise certain voters.

I just had a wonderful vision of a single transferable vote system for 435 at-large members of the U.S. House of Representatives. I can see it now. You get your ballot and there are 6278 names on it. You have to number them in order of your preference 1-6278. Then a supercomputer somewhere crunches the 100,000,000 votes to pick 435 representatives. Elections would be *so* much more fun!

"Each state determines its own district boundaries, either through legislation or through non-partisan panels. "Malapportionment" is unconstitutional and districts must be approximately equal in population (see Wesberry v. Sanders)."

Draugnar, I suggest you look up what proportional representation actually is. You'll find it is nothing at all like House districting.

pastoralan, I'm no expert on the intricacies of the system but I see nothing wrong with making sure districts all have as close as physically possible the same number of people in them. I seem to remember that this practice come from the Voting Rights Act and a court ruling well before that about cows not being represented or something. If that's loose constructionalism then call me a loose constructionalist, but I just think it's the way things ought to be.

There is a federal law that says one rep per district. States get to draw their districts. One way you could easily change it is...just pass a law multiplying the number of reps(not set in constitution and originally expected to keep growing), by some number(5 would be best, but probably too big so maybe 3 or 4), then do proportional rep in all districts.

Oh, and then say that number in every district.

It would be an interesting change, but have little effect on government unless we made changes to the senate, which would be more difficult. Guess you could do the same thing...

I would like to change the system, but this would not work for the presidency...and usig multiple systems for federal elections seems a bad idea. So...acceptance voting or irv would probably be better.

I think my English isn't good enough to really argue about this with you guys, but you may want to take a look at the German electoral system, it solves some of the problems you have been mentioning above and creates others...

I'm generally a fan of PR but it does throw up as many anomilies as first past the post (FPTP). In the European elections in the UK, UKIP got 16.5% of the vote and was awarded 13 seats; the greens got 8.6% of the vote and won 2 seats; and Plaid Cymru got 0.8% of the vote and got 1 seat. If we are going to have a proportionately elected government, it must be truly proportionate. I favour the d'hont system used for the commons and then elect a small second chamber based on FPTP.

Yeah, the European elections are only partially done using PR - they're a fudge but nobody cares since the European parliament is considered pointless.

The problems with full PR are that
1. You have no 'local' MP, and a lot of MPs hold seats based on them, rather than their party. I've seen that firsthand.
2. You have no way of getting rid of a crap/sleazy/incompetent MP - because they'll be taken from a list
3. Single issue campaigners (like Martin Bell, the chap in Wales, Galloway or the Gloucester (?) doctor would never get in under PR. Likewise local parties are unlikely to meet the threshold.

I'd compromise on larger constituencies gaining some on FPTP, with groups of 3 or 4 topping up (say +2) based on PR (so 3 seats with 40:30:30 ratios would give 3:1:1 - not perfect but better than 3:0:0)
3.

The biggest issue is that (based on uniform swing), the LibDems could get 40% of the vote and still be 3rd in seats!

Pete, problem 3 was addressed in South Africa, where there was no threshold. If you got 1/400 of the vote, you got 1 of the 400 seats. That helps both small parties and single-issue parties. In the US, you'd need something like 250,000 votes, and I'm sure there are all sorts of single issues that could achieve that threshold.

how so?

> How did the Labour party succeed in slanting the electoral system so far in their favor?
I could be wrong but I suspect the real problem here in the UK is that the boundaries between constituancies get changed over time as the population in an area changes. This is done (these days) by an "independant" organisation, but the party in power will undoubtedly have more influence over their decisions than the other parties.

Given that the Liberals haven't been in power for generations, they're bound to have had little influence over this in all that time and the Conservatives haven't been in power for the last 13 years, so Labour have had a lot more influence lately.

As I said, I could be wrong, but I think this is how we have ended up with a few large Liberal voting constituancies, more medium sized Tory voting constituancies and many small Labour voting constituancies.

@pastoralan

It may solve 3, but not 1 & 2. And in the UK, they are seen as important.