How powerful is your constituency?

Data is certainly starting to play an important role in this election, giving us glimpses into our electoral system that were the preserve only of hardcore psephologists up until now. Today the New Economics Foundation has launched its voter power index , which ranks every constituency in Britain according to the amount of power each voter has in the election. NEF points out that in the 2005 election, the majority of voters did not vote for the MP that represents them (over 52%), meaning that over 14 million votes were effectively discarded. Under the current system, voters in very safe seats have the equivalent of one hundredth of a vote, while voters in the most variable swing seats get the power of up to 1.31 votes each. In other words voters living in the most influential postcodes have over 500 times as much power as those living in the least influential … The average UK voter has 0.25 of a vote. This comes soon after research by the electoral reform society which identified all the safe seats in the UK . Designed by developer Martin Petts using some of our data to kick off with, the website ranks each of the UK's 650 constituencies according to their power. It also allows users to see how many votes are effectively lost in the first-past-the-post system. The data is below ( methodology here ). What can you do with it? Download the data • DATA: download the full datasheet World government data • Search the world's government with our gateway Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter