Your thoughts on your vote...

[Kanamori]

Woah, wait up. That will happen at some point and level in any system of democracy you care to devise. Suppose you have nationwide PR. There are 100 MPs, and the national vote is 40% tory, 40% labour, 20% Lib Dem. so each gets that number of MPs. Then in the very first vote in Parliament, the labour and Lib dem MPs gang up and outvote the tories 60:40. Could the 40% of the country that voted tory complain their votes were a waste?

In that system the correct reperesentation goes to the legislature. In FPP, it doesn't. Your representative is determined by a simple majority and nothing else. I don't know exactly about ours, but FPP results in totally whacky proportions in your system, to be sure. My complaint did not have anything to do w/ the somewhat unwilling being governed, it had to do w/ representation at the district level and with representation at the national level. The right proportion isn't even sent to the legislature. So, someone who votes for a fringe party has absolutely no chance of having a representative in the legislature to at least officially voice an opinion, if not to have it acted on. More importantly, these people cannot even have a representative of theirs vote in different ways, rather being victims of the major parties' whips -- I dare say Britain is feeling this as Blair forces through stupid legislation easily, regardless of popular opinion. Often, the fringe parties hold more complex stances than the simple mindedness of the major ones, and could almost certainly play a major role in controversial legislation, which would be even better for a democracy. Votes are wasted.