What do Jean-Marie Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen have in common?  All three are or were leaders of major anti-immigrant parties.  All three have repeatedly tried and failed to get elected in their country in single-member districts.  And all of them keep on being easily re-elected to the European Parliament, which uses multi-member districts.

In fact, Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected in French legislative elections once in 1986, as leader of the Front National, when France’s electoral system changed for a few months from single-member to multi-member districts.  In that election, the Front National went from 0 to 35 seats. Alarmed, France immediately changed its electoral system back to single-member districts two-round voting.

Single-member districts do a good job of keeping unpopular extremist politics away from power, and ranked voting or the closely related two-round voting do an even better job.