The miracle of gerrymandering in the UK:

[theweaselking]

In one example borough, Labour took 90% of the seats with <40% of the vote.

"Nationally, the Conservatives took the largest share of the vote and elected 1830 councillors. The Lib Dems came second in share of the vote, returning 909 councillors. Labour, which came third in share of the vote, elected 1439 councillors."

Comments

[jaffa-tamarin.livejournal.com]

It's a natural consequence of a political system with multiple independent constituencies each electing a single (or a few) representatives by simple majority vote. I quite agree that it's not a good system, but you can't accurately call it "gerrymandering" unless the constituency boundaries have been deliberately drawn to artificially boost a particular parties results. Which isn't at all suggested by the article you link to here.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I would call it the consequences of past gerrymandering.

We've got the same thing here in Canada, in some places, and it's hardly unique to London. 90% from 40% is just an unusually "efficient" return on votes.

[jaffa-tamarin.livejournal.com]

There doesn't need to have been any gerrymandering. If the distribution of voters is similar through the entire district and one party gets 40% support and another two get ~30% each, then drawing constituency boundaries entirely at random will result in the party with 40% support getting close to 100% of their candidates elected.

This kind of electoral systen only works at all because voters are generally not distributed evenly, so the party that has the overall majority vote will still find areas where they are locally in the minority, and there will be at least some minority party candidates elected.

The more homogenous your voter distribution, the more desperately you need to introduce a system of proportional representation.