650 total seats at stake in parliament (Majority=326). Turnout 66.1%. 30.7M voters. PARTY......VOTES OBTAINED(%)......SEATS WON.....LEADER.....(SEATS/VOTE%)RATIO Tories:..........36.9..................331.....David Cameron......8.97 Labour:..........30.4..................232.....Ed Miliband........7.63 LibDems:..........7.9....................8.....Nick Clegg.........1.01 UKIP:............12.6....................1.....Nigel Farage.......0.08 SNP:..............4.7...................56....Nicola Sturgeon....11.91 Green:............3.8....................1....Natalie Bennett.....0.26 DUP:..............0.60...................8.....Peter Robinson....13.0 UUP:..............0.37...................2.....Mike Nesbitt.......5.3 SDLP:.............0.33...................3...Alasdair McDonnell...9.2 Plaid Cymru.......0.59...................3......Leanne Wood.......5.1 Sinn Fein:........0.57...................4.......Gerry Adams......7.0 (none).............?.....................1.....Sylvia Hermon.....<3 Many other parties won zero seats of which the top two vote-getters were: Alliance and TUSC. Hermon formerly was elected from the UUP party before splitting from them in 2009 and going it alone as an independent ever since from her "North Down" constituency in N.Ireland. (She won with 17689 votes in 2015, beating Alex Easton of the DUP, who had 8487 votes, and 8 lesser rivals.) In all about 1.1% of the voters voted for a party that won zero seats. 191 Female MPs elected (23%), which is an all time high.
(Three jpg graphical versions of that table, produced by the Daily Mail: j1, j2, j3.) The UKIP is anti-European-Union, unlike most Britons and most (all?) other British parties. Its leader Nigel Farage – or rather "ex-leader," since he stepped down immediately after the election due to the UKIP's "enormous defeat" (as well as losing his own seat in South Thanet) – remarked that this election proved Britain's 'first past the past' voting system is "now totally bankrupt."
Quite. Obviously, this election was grossly disproportional, especially the comparison between SNP versus the LibDems, Greens, and UKIP. This disproportionality could be regarded as the result of massive gerrymandering, albeit certainly much of it was not intentionally designed. E.g. it naturally happened that the Greens & UKIPs were sparsely distributed everywhere while the SNPs & DUPs were concentrated in Scotland & Northern Ireland respectively – giving the latter two 40-150 times greater seats/votes ratio than the former two! However, there may also be some intentionally designed gerrymandering as well, perhaps enough to have swung this election.
Note the Tories seized a seat-majority with only 36.9% of the votes.
Did the Tories deserve to retain power? Well, the UKIP would presumably(?) have aligned with them, and together Tories+UKIP got 49.6% of the vote, which proportionally speaking would have been 322 seats. That is 4 seats short of a majority. So it is a close call whether they "deserved" power.
This all suggests that Britain would be better off if it employed a proportional system to elect at least part of its parliament (e.g. like the German system, or RRV or asset voting) or if it switched to range voting, a superior single-winner system.
I thank Toby Pereira, who was a losing MP-candidate in Braintree, for explaining a few things to me.
