East Midlands
The Conservatives performed well in 2015, winning 43% of the vote. Although under STV the Conservatives would have fewer seats, they would still have won 22 seats – 48% of the region’s MPs.
There were 544,820 wasted Conservative votes in the East Midlands. Every vote for a losing Conservative candidate counted for nothing. Every vote for a winning Conservative MP giving a majority larger than a single vote counted for nothing. These are votes that could be used to support Conservatives elsewhere.
The Electoral Reform Society called the General Election result in 27 of the region’s seats months before the election happened.
At the local level, the use of FPTP-like bloc voting for councils is bad for taxpayers. Research conducted by Dr Mihály Fazekas from the University of Cambridge has demonstrated that in councils where more than two-thirds of the councillors are from the same party, regardless of which party, tend to be worse at securing procurement savings than electorally competitive councils.