United Kingdom constituencies
In the United Kingdom (UK), each of the electoral areas or divisions called constituencies elects one member to the House of Commons.
[3] The administration of elections is carried out by the acting returning officer, who will typically be a local council's chief executive[4] or Head of Legal Services.
The spending limits for election campaigns are different in the two, the reasoning being that candidates in county constituencies tend to need to travel farther.
[9] The franchise was restricted differently in different types of constituency; in county constituencies forty shilling freeholders (i.e. landowners) could vote, while in boroughs the franchise varied from potwallopers, giving many residents votes, to rotten boroughs with hardly any voters.
After the Acts of Union 1800, smaller Irish boroughs were disenfranchised, while most others returned only one MP to the United Kingdom Parliament.
The House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 1958, eliminated the previous common electoral quota for the whole United Kingdom and replaced it with four separate national minimal seat quotas for the respective Boundaries commissions to work to, as a result the separate national electoral quotas came into effect: England 69,534; Northern Ireland 67,145, Wales 58,383 and in Scotland only 54,741 electors.
The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 gives the Boundary Commissions for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland the power to create names for constituencies, and does not provide a set of statutory guidelines for the Commissions to follow in doing so.
Eleven additional members are elected from Greater London as a whole to produce a form or degree of mixed-member proportional representation.
Each elects five MLAs to the 90 member NI Assembly by means of the single transferable vote system.
[16] There are 73 Holyrood constituencies covering Scotland, and each elects one Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) by the first-past-the-post system.
The two exceptions were the Orkney Holyrood constituency, covering the Orkney Islands council area, and the Shetland Holyrood constituency, covering the Shetland Islands council area.
One, Northern Ireland, used single transferable vote, while the eleven covering Great Britain used the d'Hondt method of party-list proportional representation.
[20] The South West England constituency was expanded from the 2004 elections onward to include Gibraltar, the only British overseas territory that was part of the European Union, following a court case.
