Britain's Labour pulled off a thumping election victory with just 34% of the national vote

LONDON — The U.K.'s Labour Party won a huge parliamentary majority in the country's general election, but a quirk of the British electoral system means it did so with just 34% of the total votes cast.

Results show that the opposition Labour Party has won 412 parliamentary seats of the total 650, with just two seats yet to be declared. This translates as roughly 63% of the total seats, but Labour has won just 34% of the total "popular" vote, while the Conservative Party has secured nearly 24% of that number.

Meanwhile, smaller parties including the centrist Liberal Democrats, right-wing Reform U.K. and the Greens took nearly 43% of the popular vote but gained just less than 18% of the seats available.

This was aided by the U.K.'s "first past the post" system, where voters choose only one single candidate from their local list in each of the country's 650 constituencies. The person with the most votes in each constituency is elected as a Member of Parliament to the House of Commons, the U.K.'s lower house. The party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons usually forms the new government and its leader becomes prime minister.

Unlike in other voting systems, there are no second rounds or ranking of first- and second-choice candidates, meaning it can be difficult for smaller parties to translate an increased share of the popular vote into parliamentary seats.

Gabriella Dickens, G7 economist at AXA Investment Managers, said in a note released Friday that this election "marks a warning sign for the political system, [as] a large majority has been delivered on a little more than a third of the popular vote."

She pointed out that voter turnout was just 60% for this election. That represents the second-lowest turnout rate