Propagation: Seeds & scions (83)

83 ideas sprouting »

1. A little bit more, but still short of details, in the FT.

   Seed planted by MSS — 25 July 2012 @ 21:10

2. Did you say NZ has the provision for extra seats, to compensate for overhang? The NZ MMP review website seems to indicate that this isn’t the case.

   Seed planted by JD — 26 July 2012 @ 05:30

3. JD, from Elections New Zealand:

   If a party wins more electorate seats than its share of seats determined by the party vote then the extra seats are not taken away and the number of MPs in parliament increases, for the life of that parliament.

   Unfortunately the terminology for overhangs/balance seats is really quite confusing. Imagine an MMP election with 10 constituency seats and 10 compensatory seats, in which Party A wins 8 constituencies on 30% of the vote.

   One option is to preserve both legislature size and proportionality, but not constituency wins. Simply disallow the overhangs, and award two constituencies to some other party. Party A wins 6 seats, and other parties win 14. People sometimes say this is the “no overhangs” option.

   A second option is to preserve constituency wins and legislature size, but not proportionality. Distribute the compensatory seats via a highest-average method like D’Hondt, starting with the number of constituencies won. Party A ends up with 8 seats, and other parties with 12, fewer than they would expect. Sometimes people think of it as “subtracting from compensatory seats”, others call this “no overhangs” instead of the first option.

   The third option is to preserve the number of seats each party can expect given their votes, independent of other parties’ results. Distribute the total number of seats proportionally, but then allow parties to keep any extra constituencies, which we’ll call “adding overhangs”. Or, to look at it differently, first figure out the number of overhangs, add that to the compensatory seats, and then distribute just the compensatory seats as in option two. This way around, it’s “adding balance seats”. Party A has 8 seats, but other parties still have the 14 seats they’d expect, and the legislature is bigger.

   Fourth and last, you can preserve constituency wins and proportionality, at the cost of legislature size. If a party wins more constituencies than its fair share of seats, expand the number of seats until everything’s proportional. Party A wins 8 seats, and other parties take 17, for a quite expanded legislature. The can also be called “adding balance seats”.

   That’s three different options which involve overhangs, one of which is sometimes called “no overhangs”. Two different options refer to “balance seats”, meaning different things. We really need more precise terms! How about we name each option after somebody?

   Seed planted by Vasi — 26 July 2012 @ 08:06

4. JD, the number of overhang seats (if any) is added to the total number of seats in the NZ Parliament (until the next election). So it’s a partial compensation that does not completely ‘balance’ the chamber.

   Seed planted by Errolwi — 26 July 2012 @ 08:08

5. This is the best article I’ve found so far. Money quote:

   [T[he court says it wants the Bundestag to limit the number of extra seats so that "they match the basic character of the election result." Vosskuhle says that 15 such seats might be acceptable.

   I wish I had some idea what the coalition’s new electoral law entailed, I’ve seen very little information on it in English.

   Seed planted by Vasi — 26 July 2012 @ 08:18

6. Vasi, thanks for the DW story. I actually went there as soon as I saw the Montreal Gazette story, but DW English at the time did not seem to have anything up yet.

   I love that even DW has a sub-heading in the article, just before explaining the existing system: “Not easy to understand”. Then the heading before a brief summary of the court ruling is “Not at all easy to understand”! Indeed.

   Seed planted by MSS — 26 July 2012 @ 11:37

7. And, yes, the terminology here is not always clear–obviously including my description.

   I consider the overhang in New Zealand to be partially balanced by the fact that the house is expanded in size if some party wins one or more nominal-tier seats beyond what its proportional share of the initial house size would have been (120 in NZ). The NZ House has had 121 or 122 seats in recent elections, due to the Maori Party winning several districts, but hardly any party-list votes.

   If the house were kept at 120, then the Maori Party “overhang” (as I am using the term) would come at the expense of one (or two) other parties. By adding the seat to the house total, this other party still gets its seat (or parties… seats). However, the result will still be somewhat less proportional than it would have been had the extra nominal-tier seat(s) been disallowed.

   In Germany, this process is carried out state by state, which is why there can be so many additional seats. In some states, one party nearly or completely sweeps the nominal-tier constituencies, and is so over-represented that the initial number of compensatory list seats would be insufficient. So they add “balance” seats, increasing for that parliament the number of seats the state has. One might think that if there were constitutional issues, this would be it–allowing a state to exceed its population-weighted share of seats in the federal parliament.

   It is possible that have conflated what Vasi describes as options three and four.

   Then consider Bolivia and New Zealand Venezuela: there are no additional seats, so when a party wins more nominal-tier seats than its party-list share would have allowed, it simply is a source of disproportionality. (This is what Vasi describes as the second option.)

   (Pardon the dumb mistake in the original there; obviously I knew NZ from what I wrote in the second paragraph, but somehow I mixed up my countries with Z’s in their names by the time I got to the end of the comment.)

   Seed planted by MSS — 26 July 2012 @ 11:54

8. Spiegel has more, although not the sort of anoraky things many of us crave. It does have some nice excerpts from various German newspaper editorials about the political implications of the ruling. I particularly like this observation from Handeslblatt:

   With its verdict, the court has made it clear that voting laws are there first and foremost to serve the people. Only secondarily are election laws there for their representatives in parliament. Yet one gets the impression that many parliamentarians simply refuse to accept that fact.

   Seed planted by MSS — 26 July 2012 @ 15:30

9. MSS, I’m not sure you have that quite right, though it’s possible I’m mixed up.

   Option #2, allowing overhangs but keeping the size of the legislature the same, is used by Bolivia.

   Option #3, where the legislature expands by just the number of overhangs, is used by the German federal legislature (Bundestag). As you pointed out, overhangs are reckoned on a state-by-state basis in the Bundestag. This is also the option used in New Zealand.

   Option #4, where the legislature expands for full proportionality, is used in some (all?) German state parliaments.

   I’m not aware of anywhere that uses #1, though I’m sure I’ve read proposals along that line before.

   There seems to be a page on wahlrecht.de with a nice illustration of the differing options. I’m glad to see they mostly agree with my interpretation!

   Seed planted by Vasi — 26 July 2012 @ 18:35

10. I find the last paragraph of the article Vasi cites deeply persuasive.

    Seed planted by Alan — 26 July 2012 @ 20:31

11. Vasi, I don’t think we disagree! At least not on the various options you sketched–which I found very useful, by the way.

    I see option #2 as the Bolivia/Venezuela approach, option #3 as New Zealand and how I understand Germany. I was not sure whether option #4 was actually used anywhere, but it is good to know that there might be some German sates that do so. (I hope someone can confirm; maybe this is in the Massicotte article I have a copy of somewhere in this office).

    As for option #1, I would not consider it MMP or any kind of mixed-member system, because such systems by definition (as I understand it) require that there be a tier of districts in which candidates win based on their own individual vote totals. If said “wins” can be taken away to preserve proportionality (and legislature size), then the individual vote totals are not necessarily decisive in those districts.

    Option #1 would have features in common with the current Romanian system–which really, really is complex!

    If by disagreement you meant overhang/balance seat terminology, I have often not even used “balance” seats, and called the extra seats themselves overhangs. However, someone persuaded me–maybe it was Wilf–that any extra seat won in the nominal tier should itself be called an overhang. (And I also recall Wilf does not like the term, overhang; neither do I, but I think we might just be stuck with it.) If the legislature is expanded after an overhang, defined this way, then it seems to make sense to call that extra seat a “balance” as that’s what it does. If we have a system using option #4, with still more seats added, we probably should call them “super-compensatory seats” or something like that.

    I am not wedded to any of this terminology–other than that which defines what is an MM system and of which kind–and would be happy to have it standardized by someone! I regret that I did not even try to clarify all this in the volume on mixed-member systems that I co-edited some years ago.

    Seed planted by MSS — 26 July 2012 @ 21:55

12. I was just referring to the line “Then consider Bolivia and New Zealand: there are no additional seats…This is what Vasi describes as the second option”. You must have meant Venezuela instead of NZ.

    Seed planted by Vasi — 27 July 2012 @ 02:29

13. Vasi, thanks for noticing. That was just me being careless. I fixed it now (in the end of comment #7).

    Seed planted by MSS — 27 July 2012 @ 16:21

14. The Merkel coalition totally transformed the list seat allocation method late last year following a previous ruling from the Constitutional Court in July 2008, mentioned here before. “Negatives Stimmgewicht”, the phenomenon where additional votes sometimes can have negative consequences in standard MMP (a party may be worse off if it receives more list votes in a region where it wins surplus constituency seats), was then deemed unconstitutional. The 2009 election would however go ahead as before since the politicians were given a three year deadline to address the issue.

    The coalition actually missed the deadline (during which time the country was without a valid electoral law), but later passed a contorted and ultimately inadequate reform that aimed to technically abide by the ruling but also to preserve the un-proportional advantage of overhang seats which the plurality party (usually the CDU) has often enjoyed since 1990. Here follows an outline of that reform (thanks as usual to wahlrecht.de, also for an Excel file buried within its pages which I leave as a link on my name):

    1. Since 1957, seats have been allocated to parties based on nationwide proportionality, then distributed within each party down to the Land lists. The reform reversed this, by opting for an initial regional allocation based on all valid and invalid list votes at the election, after which the seats would be divided among above-hurdle parties within each Land (Sainte Laguë has been the standard formula federally since 2008, and remains so). This was apparently meant to remove a main source for actual occurrences of the aforementioned unconstitutional paradox, but in the main this is nonsense.

    2. However, that by itself would have left votes for a small party in a small Land without any value, except toward the nationwide hurdle. This would be constitutional, but would have been a problem for the FDP in many places. Therefore an entirely different class of surplus seat was created: Within each Land, a Hare quota would be calculated based on all votes for above-hurdle parties. Votes in excess of those quotas (and votes not yielding any list seats at all) would then be added up nationally and given additional seats based on a similar federal Hare quota (a 598th of all votes for above-hurdle parties), with standard rounding. These seats would then be given to the lists where the parties had the most such unused votes. Based on the 2009 result, this would have added eight seats to the total, one or two for each non-regional party. Note that this would only be a halfway restoration of nationwide proportionality, since the quotas would be unequal and most importantly since negative numbers would not be added to the national adjustment.

    3. After all list seats had been calculated, the reform kept surplus constituency seats as before. However, due to the new allocation methods, the number of such seats at the 2009 election would have been reduced from 24 to 22. The Bundestag would have had 628 seats (598+8+22) instead of 622 (598+24).

    After the reform went into force in December 2011, the people connected to wahlrecht.de again launched a popular petition to submit the electoral law to the Constitutional Court, on the grounds that it did not actually solve the constitutional issue – indeed, it added different problems and new complexities for plainly partisan reasons. They were joined separately by the federal opposition.

    As a result, these reforms have now been thrown out by the Constitutional Court, which again leaves German electoral law in limbo. I have not yet read a good, concise analysis of the ruling, but just from the highlighted points it seems a little muddled. As Vasi mentioned, the court said it would be fine with overhang seats as long as it was limited to a maximum of about half a parliamentary party, around 15 seats. Perhaps the court (technically, the second “Senate” of the court) was trying to nudge the coalition into adopting a compromise solution halfway between it and the opposition? Perhaps the even-numbered court, which is by custom nominated in a politically balanced way, was itself deadlocked and had to compromise?

    In summary, the entire thing is a mess.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 29 July 2012 @ 01:27

15. Wow Espen, that really is complex! Thanks for the detailed breakdown.

    It’s hard to believe the national-compensatory-seat “feature” was added for the benefit of the FDP though, since they would only gain a seat or two. In fact, the example spreadsheet shows 3 such seats going to the coalition, and 5 to the opposition.

    Seed planted by Vasi — 29 July 2012 @ 06:10

16. Well, the FDP are going to need every vote next time, and depressing their vote for any reason even in the least populous Länder would not be in their interest. In this instance, the FDP had more in common with the other small and middle-sized parties than with the CDU, but unlike the others the FDP were in a position to protect their interests inside the majority.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 29 July 2012 @ 14:40

17. Trying to read the details of the German allocation, I am very glad that NZ has a single list!

    Seed planted by Errolwi — 30 July 2012 @ 02:29

18. Thank you, Espen!

    Seed planted by MSS — 30 July 2012 @ 14:15

19. Espen,

    I don’t see how the “residual vote recovery” (Reststimmenverwertung) helps small parties more than any other party; I would expect its effect to be more or less random, so that it would be expected to give each party roughly one seat for every eight Lander [1]. Indeed, your very nice spreadsheet [2] gives one or two seats to each party, which conforms to my expectations, but as indicated in the complaint to the Court, there is no obvious correlation with this amount to the number of votes cast. Now, proportionally speaking, one extra seat for a small party makes a bit more difference to that party than one extra seat for a larger party, but in reality the extra seat for the larger party could make the difference between a majority and a coalition, so that’s not totally clear either. What seems to me certain is that the expected result of this provision (neglible) is not worth the complexity (considerable, particularly when you consider the interactions with other provisions).

    It’s entirely possible that the Free Democrats fought for it out of a mistaken view of its importance, perhaps based on the same intuition you express (votes for small parties in small Lander are useless). It’s true that in Bremen (M=5), the effective threshold is just under 10% (as you’d expect with Saint-Lagüe), and the FDP just squeaked in with 10.6%). On the other hand, the 35,968 Bremern who voted from the FDP (many of whom did not vote for their local FDP candidate) received more than twice the representation per vote than their almost 80,000 brethern who voted CDU. Even with an overhang seat, the 102,419 SDP voters got 30% less value per vote. So if the FDP had gotten 2,000 fewer votes, they would have lost that seat, but I’m inclined to say something like “them’s the breaks” (or, “some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you.”)

    It’s also interesting to note that the number of “residual” votes is pretty small; a total of 600,000 of which the largest party share is about 160,000 in the example in the spreadsheet. The 5% threshold eliminated several parties whose total vote was much higher than 160,000 [3]; two of them received more votes than the total residual recovery. In all, 2.6 million voters were disenfranchised by the threshold, which apparently does not require democratic soul-searching. Still, if I were one of those parties’ voters, I might well object.

    There are a couple of other oddities in the German electoral law that I noted, now that you’ve inclined me to look at it. One is the provision that voters’ second votes are ignored if they vote for a successful candidate who doesn’t correspond to any list. (If I understand it correctly, that would include successful candidates whose list was eliminated by the threshold.) I assume the intention was to prevent disconnecting constituency and list parties, but it seems like it creates other distortions.

    fn1. I’m not sure how to compute the precise expected number of compensatory seats, but the rough approximation goes like this: suppose that the Hare-like qouta (i.e. total votes for qualifying parties divided by total seats) is roughly the same as the Saint-Lagüe quota (using some intermediate value for the Saint-Lagüe quota), and further assume (less likely for small Lander) that the value is roughly the same as the national Hare-like quota. Then the fractional part of the divisions are likely to be evenly distributed in the range (-0.5, +0.5]. However, negative values are ignored, so the expected value of a qualifying fraction is 0.125 (average positive value is 0.25 and half the fractions are positive). All Lander being roughly equal, that should add up to 2.0 for each party. In reality, we’d expect it to be slightly lower because of the distortion of small Lander, but in fact it seems to work out pretty well; your spreadsheet shows that the total of all 5*16 fractions is 9.58, just slightly less than the expected 10.0.

    fn2: Super-geeky spreadsheet comment: I’ve never seen that particular mechanism to compute d’Hondt or Sainte-Lagüe. Interesting. My solution (which works in the current version of LibreOffice, at least) doesn’t require setting up hidden cells. In G30, put the formula:
    =LARGE(MMULT($D24:$D28,1/ (TRANSPOSE(ROW(OFFSET($A$1,0,0,$E29,1)))-0.5)),$E29)
    which computes the largest possible Sainte-Lagüe quota. (The transpose(…) stuff is a hack which compensates for the absence of an IOTA-like function.)

    fn3: “threshold” is the normal English word for “Hürde” in this context, although “hurdle” has a nice image. Anyway, I think the Court may have been thinking along the same lines as me: “Überdies werde die Wahlrechtsgleichheit verletzt, indem in kleinen Ländern größere Stimmanteile für die Erlangung eines Parlamentssitzes erreicht werden müssten, als für eine Überwindung der Fünf-Prozent-Hürde benötigt würden.”

    Seed planted by rici — 30 July 2012 @ 18:07

20. Epsen,

    Sorry, I do not want to seem like a dummy. But I need a little clarification on the old national seat calculation have resulted in “negative vote” (a vote hurting the intended party)?

    Under the old national allocation system, I get the impression there were not fixed compensatory seats per region. So total seats were calculated, and then allocated down to states by party without any concern for a desired number of compensatory seats per state rather just getting the party compensatory seats right.

    Also, were additional seats for overhangs were calculated at the national level? Please confirm if this is correct, or if they were added at the state level despite using a national allocation for the seat total. I assume they are now entirely determined at the state level.

    Big question

    How would a party in an overhang position in a state be negatively impacted by having an additional vote under this system? Wouldn’t it still have gotten counted to the national total which at worst would have no effect (rather than a negative effect)?

    I get the other adjustments for small magnitude states in point #2 of your post.

    I would really appreciate any feedback you guys have.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 30 July 2012 @ 19:55

21. Nick, that puzzled me, too. But fortunately, there’s an example at http://www.wahlrecht.de/ueberhang/beispiel-bundestagswahl-2005.html (in German, but it’s mostly tables and Google translate does OK with the text.)

    The procedure was that the total representation was computed nationally for each party, and then apportioned between states by party. All this was done before considering direct constituency elections.

    So as your vote in a state increases, proportionally more of your seats are assigned to that state. But at this point you might have overhang seats. Now suppose your vote goes up a little bit in that state without your winning any more FPTP constituencies and without your qualifying for any more national seats. That’s certainly conceivable. But it’s still possible that the inter-state allocation will change, and you’ll get one more seat in that state and one fewer in some other state. In that case, you’ve lost an overhang seat, so your representation goes down (becomes more proportional) and there is also one fewer parliamentarian. Hence, more votes and fewer seats.

    Seed planted by rici — 30 July 2012 @ 21:40

22. Nick,

    Rici explains it well. If overhangs are created, the so favoured party is better off being allocated fewer theoretical list seats in that region. I may add that such paradoxical situations may sometimes be accurately predictable, and the voters of such a party are well advised instead to use their list vote for an allied party.

    Rici,

    First let me make clearer that the spreadsheet is not mine, and downloads directly from wahlrecht.de. Your formula seems interesting though – I have always used multiple cells myself, and maybe should try it.

    You are right that the residual vote pooling mechanism mostly helps small parties more than large ones in a relative sense only. However, if a small party wins zero initial list seats in many places these will all have positive residuals (though perhaps these residuals will be smaller than average), whereas if a large party generally does win initial list seats you would expect only roughly half to have positive residuals.

    More important is that from 1957 every list vote – even those not expected to result in local list seats – has helped a party win seats in the nationwide proportional allocation. This was especially noticeable for the old PDS, which was tiny in the West but whose votes there still pooled to add a few extra seats nationally. Retaining a national logic as opposed to a local logic to list seat allocation is clearly important for small parties, since de facto district magnitudes then rise (in Germany, from around 5-150 to 598+). As long as the hurdle is reached, there is a virtual guarantee that no list votes are wasted.

    As far as parties under the hurdle is concerned, they were of course not sitting around the negotiating table, and while negative vote values were deemed unconstitutional by the court, neutralised vote values were not. However, in recent years the German courts have actually protected the rights of smaller parties in elections to assemblies where the parliamentary system does not apply (and so considerations of governmental stability are deemed to lack justification). In local government, hurdles have been thrown out in recent decades, and in 2011 the 5% hurdle for MEPs was deemed unconstitutional as well.

    On the elimination of second votes when an independent candidate wins a constituency seat, this somewhat weirdly only applies to a below-hurdle party if it has no list in that particular Land. When the PDS won two Berlin seats in 2002 but fell below 5% nationally, no second votes were cut.

    Let me finally echo wholeheartedly that this is a horrible, inelegant, no-good system.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 30 July 2012 @ 23:46

23. (By that last “no-good system” I refer of course to the 2011 seat allocation reforms).

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 31 July 2012 @ 00:40

24. Espen, this may have been true back in the d’Hondt days, and even possibly in the Hare days. But since moving to Sainte-Lagüe, I think not. It’s impossible for a small party to “win zero initial list seats in many places” unless it is so small that it fails to jump the hurdle, in which case it’s not eligible for residuals either.

    There are only two lander with district magnitude less than 12: Bremen (5) and Saarland (8). With Sainte-Lagüe in a district with M=12, you are guaranteed a seat if you have 1/24th of the total vote of the parties participating in the second vote. That’s just a little over 4%, and it would normally be less than 4% of the total vote which includes all the underhurdlers plus spoiled ballots etc. But we’ve assumed you’ve got 5% of the vote, so you’ve probably got it cased everywhere except maybe Bremen, although it’s possible that you get an abnormally small vote in one or two places.

    So you might fail to make the cut in one or two constituencies, but not in “many”, and therefore you are arguably just as likely as anyone to have a balanced set of positive and negative residuals.

    In fact, there are six constituencies with district magnitude less than 20, so you might argue the reverse: small parties which meet the hurdle are *more* likely to have a negative residual in the smaller lander, and therefore are more likely to lose out on residuals. For what it’s worth, that is actually what you see in the wahlrecht simulation: the three smaller parties got 10, 10 and 9 negative residuals, while the two larger ones got 9 and 6 (counting CDU/CSU as one party). But that’s totally anecdotal, and I don’t think I’m prepared to even try to make this case, really. In fact, in the simulation, every party got at least one seat in every constituency, even Bremen which split five ways on five seats (plus an overhang).

    Seed planted by rici — 31 July 2012 @ 03:46

25. Gee MMP is so simple and intelligible…

    Seed planted by Alan — 31 July 2012 @ 09:22

26. Rici, you are certainly correct that in practice Sainte-Laguë makes the whole thing more of a wash than under D’Hondt (though perhaps not Hare/Niemeyer). The “margin of error”, or accumulated lucky and unlucky allocations, should be more randomly shared between large and small parties, so it is possible that even a small party can actually do better than under a national calculation. This potential advantage will be totally unpredictable though.

    However, I think my main points still stand. In a purely relative sense vote-pooling should be more beneficial to the smaller parties. Also, the guarantee that all their list votes will matter removes a potential disincentive to vote for small parties in some places.

    I believe these are the main reasons the pooling mechanism was invented. It was clearly not included at the behest of the CDU, since it potentially cuts into their overhangs. The CSU will get no benefit at all. It was intended then as a small payback to the FDP in return for it supporting the interests of its senior coalition partners on the main issue of overhangs.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 31 July 2012 @ 15:57

27. Guys, great explanation of the negative vote values. You guys give very clear explanation (unlike the wiki article). Makes sense now.

    I didn’t realize the previous allocation was so unsophisticated to allow the total seats allocated to each party and to each state both to be fluid figures. Typically, you’d assume one total would not be alterable (I’d assume the number of seats by party).

    Alright, so next one. I understand that second votes of independents and below threshold parties who do not run a list in the state are not counted. Are there any specifics on the path of this calc? Wouldn’t all the national election results need to be calculated first to determine all of the party percentages before then going back to remove the votes for independents and below threshold parties.

    Also, from my understanding, even if a party is below the threshold, if they have won 3 SMDs, they still qualify for compensatories? How would such a party’s second votes (where different from the party) be counted in such a situation?

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 31 July 2012 @ 21:48

28. “Malicious voices in Dresden”… gotta love Google Translate.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 31 July 2012 @ 23:53

29. Alan,

    I think the German system was quite straight-forward before this reform. Perhaps some implications of it were a bit hard to explain; that can be true for list systems and STV too. As long as politicians or jurists have a can-do spirit, any system can get mucked up (see mandatory preferences, above-the-line voting).

    Nick,

    Your third paragraph raises a peculiar chicken-or-egg problem. As best I can figure out, all second votes must count when national totals are first added up to determine which parties reach the threshold. Even if cuts incredibly were later to pull a party’s “effective” vote beneath 5%, it would already have reached the hurdle.

    No second votes have ever actually had to be cut in this way, at least federally. It would be easy to do in practice though, since both votes are cast on the same ballot paper. Incidentally, this essential link is why when in that Dresden district a far-right candidate died after nominations in 2005, the casting of list votes had to be postponed along with the constituency votes (since overhangs were in jeopardy there, this of course made the negative vote value problem very acute).

    On your final point: If three or more constituencies are won, votes are treated exactly as if the party had gotten over 5% nationally (see the PDS in 1994).

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 01 August 2012 @ 17:41

30. @Espen

    This thread does raise an interesting point. I doubt MMP would be constitutional in Australia because overhang/balance seats would disturb the proportionate representation of states in the House of Representatives. I suspect that would also be the case in the US and possibly Canada.

    Seed planted by Alan — 02 August 2012 @ 01:51

31. Alan,

    I think the answer would likely be that in any country where representation by province/state were important, they would simply have the calculation done at that sub-national level.

    This would likely require overhangs to be allowed with other parties simply having their share of seats shrunk, as was done in Lesotho and certain other MMP models rather than introducing extra seats.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 02 August 2012 @ 02:45

32. Espen (re cutting votes): I actually looked at the law for counting votes because I was curious about that. It requires that votes be counted as follows:

    First, take all of the ballots where the second vote is for the party of the first vote, and put them into individual piles by candidate. Count each pile.

    Then sort the remaining ballots by candidate, and split them by second vote. Now count each second vote choice corresponding to each candidate. Record all these counts somewhere just in case.

    Finally, report the total first vote by candidate and the total second vote by party.

    If at the end of this process, it is determined that the winning candidate does not correspond to a party eligible for list votes, then go back to the detailed matrix and subtract the second vote choices corresponding to that candidate.

    As you say, that could (in theory) drop a small party under the threshold, but it cannot affect the result in this constituency because the party in question didn’t win this constituency, and only second choice votes corresponding to the winner need to be eliminated. So the procedure might cascade to other constituencies, but termination is guaranteed because you can only eliminate a candidate’s party once. It’s all highly unlikely, anyway.

    Seed planted by rici — 02 August 2012 @ 03:21

33. Yes, of course, what Nick suggests is precisely what is done in Bolivia and Venezuela. So I see no reason MMP could not be used, constitutionally, in Australia or the USA. It does mean one trades off proportionality to states vs. proportionality to parties in the opposite way from Germany. As I have said before, I find it surprising that German federalism permits their solution, and that the constitutional issues lie elsewhere. (Personally, I prefer proportionality to parties, but that’s beside the point.)

    If one wants both forms of proportionality, then indeed, MMP may not be a viable choice.

    Seed planted by MSS — 02 August 2012 @ 15:48

34. MSS: But, proportionality of what? District population? Registered voters? Or actual people who vote?

    My hypothesis was that the German district allocation system basically favours districts with higher turnout, since the party allocation formula, whatever method is used, should favour the larger numbers resulting from turnout. To test that hypothesis, I computed the Gallagher proportionality index of district representation versus registered voters (since I don’t have census numbers handy) and against total votes cast, for all federal elections 1949-2009. I also computed the Gallagher index of district consitutency count against registered voters. (Actually, I have no idea if the voters are registered, or how Germany computes the turnout. I’m just assuming that it is a meaningful number.)

    The results are here (as a Google spreadsheet), and I don’t know that any definitive answer can be derived from that, but it seems like the district allocation mechanism does not distort proportionality much, and indeed distorts it less if you consider votes instead of voters. (The overhangs, however, do add a bit of disproportionality back.)

    So on some level, it seems like the system should encourage turnout, at least if you care about the representation of your Land. It’s not immediately obvious that that is harmful.

    Seed planted by rici — 03 August 2012 @ 18:10

35. Members of the Bundestag all officially represent the whole German people, and not their Länder, so there would be no constitutional problem with having representation based on turnout (or overhangs). Perhaps it even could be argued that erecting geographical barriers against the equal representation of voters would be a bigger constitutional problem, but that is probably taking it too far.

    On US or Australian MMP: What about a federalised calculation of fixed numbers of list seats? States would then retain their separate population-based delegations, but even single-member states could participate in the list tier (their own seat, like any other district seat, would be filled by plurality).

    It depends on how strictly a federal constitution mandates the complete separation of the representation of states. The US Constitution says that members are “chosen [..] by the People of the several States” and “shall be apportioned among the several States”. Unless that severs all possible interstate linkages between votes, Congress is in possession of wide powers to regulate this.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 03 August 2012 @ 23:38

36. The Australian constitution uses the same language (no accident, that) as the US constitution. The problem with a federalised calculation is that I suspect it would be argued that the list MPs would not then be representatives of the people of a State.

    Subnational MMP would work, but then you would bump into magnitude problems with Tasmania (5) and the Territories (2 each). In the US the number of very small magnitude states would be a real problem for a subnational solution.

    It may be the case that List PR or STV would only take legislation but MMP would require a constitutional amendment.

    Seed planted by Alan — 04 August 2012 @ 02:42

37. You are probably right, Alan, but we will never know for sure because surely it will never get through the legislatures in the first place.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 04 August 2012 @ 03:15

38. Australia may move toward proportional representation if the Greens continue to win seats in the House. Electoral systems tend to follow party systems. It would almost inevitably be STV here.

    Seed planted by Alan — 04 August 2012 @ 03:56

39. Though it is probable that a system that has national allocations for compensatory seats that allocates those seats to a fixed regional allocation can be worked out.

    It would likely fail under certain exterme conditions of vote splitting.

    I’ve tried to work out a model for Canada; it can lead to fairly complex allocations. Mine have always worked because I was working on four or five party basis. This would not necessarily be true if say, parties ran as separate legal entities within each district.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 04 August 2012 @ 12:24

40. Espen, yes it is clearly stated that members of the Bundestag are representatives of the whole people and respond only to their own consciences.

    Still, in reality we know that they are members of parties and elected from Länder. I don’t personally have a problem with that, it’s just an observation. If there were not some concept of pertinence to a Land, then it would be much easier to have a single national list and have overhang seats only in the rare case where that the proportional allocation for a party didn’t match the national nominal election of that party, as in New Zealand. That would pretty well eliminate the overhang problem, but it would affect any concept of regional proportionality which might be lingering about.

    I think it would be fine to say that regional proportionality was based on turnout rather than population, but it would be good to be explicit about that so that voters understood. (Or maybe they do, I’ve never asked a German voter about this.) But the most interesting thing that came out of the exercise I did yesterday was the peak in disproportionality resulting from the 2002 election when the PDS failed to meet quota despite gaining something like 17% of the vote in Berlin and former East German Länder. The consequence was that something like 17% of the voters in six Länder were effectively disenfranchised and the Länder representation correspondingly reduced, because the representation is not really based on turnout but rather vote for parties which jump the hurdle.

    So, in short (which I should have been at the beginning), my opinion is that the anti-proportional aspects remaining in the German system are (1) the threshold, which should be reduced to two or three percent at most, and (2) overhangs. It seems that the Constitutional Court is more concerned with the latter than the former; of course, I defer to their judgement.

    It would be easy to reduce overhangs by simply reducing the list vote to be distributed to each party nationally by the number of overhangs prior to allocation to Länd lists (in a hypothetical return to the previous law). I don’t know how that would distort district proportionality but I suspect it would distort it less than leaving the overhangs in place.

    Seed planted by rici — 04 August 2012 @ 12:48

41. Alan (36),

    Any list system or MMP system that did not allow voters to directly choose individual candidates would be unconstitutional in Australia under Section 7 of the Constitution:
    “The Senate shall be composed of senators for each State, directly chosen by the people of the State, voting, until the Parliament otherwise provides, as one electorate….”.
    (Section 24 has the same “directly chosen” point for the House of Representatives.)

    As you know, but others may not, under our STV system, voters indicate a preference for every candidate from 1 to whatever, even if that means 1 to 60 or 1 to 80. They can vote 1 for the number two Labor candidate, 2 for the number one DLP candidate and 3 for the number five Greens candidate if they wish. They can also choose to vote above the line by putting a number against the party they prefer. In this case, they have chosen to follow their party’s preferences. This treats the system as if it is a party list one, but constitutionally it is not because voters have chosen a pre-determined list of preferences, but they do not have to. They are directly choosing candidates in order, even though it is an order presented to them in advance. They are still free to vote in any other order they wish. If they were compelled to indicate support for a party only, that would mean that the Senate was not “directly chosen by the people of the State”, but by a combination of party machine and the people.

    I am not sure about an open list system, as voters could directly select from within their preferred list, though someone may make a constitutional argument that being restricted to choices within one list, rather than across all lists, is also a restriction on “directly chosen by the people”.

    I any case, the more I read of complicated PR and semi-PR and quasi-PR and pretend-PR systems around the world, the more I think STV is the way to go.

    Seed planted by Chris Curtis — 04 August 2012 @ 23:14

42. @Chris

    The problem with your argument is that preferential voting was not introduced for the House until 1918. True preferential voting was not introduced for the Senate until 1948. Until those dates all federal parliamentary elections suffered precisely the infirmities you describe as fatal. Until 1918 FPTP applied in house elections and an elector faced the same restrictions as under a closed list PR system. It follows that List-PR would be as constitutional as STV-PR.

    One weakness not already discussed is that I think the High Court would take a very, very dim view of exclusionary thresholds. In the prisoner franchise case the court spoke a lot about the need for the parliament to be elected by universal adult franchise. It’s not immediately obvious why they would accept ‘everyone except those unfortunate enough to vote for parties that don’t reach the threshold’ as being universal adult franchise.

    Seed planted by Alan — 05 August 2012 @ 06:32

43. Chris @41, I agree with your last point esp if “STV” means either Hare-Clark (Robson rotation within party groups, and semi-optional preferences) or at least the “Gaelic” model (single alphabetical list – although random placement with party grouping would be better – and fully optional preferences).

    Unfortunately, within Australia in its last few incarnations (since the ACT 1992-95 victory) it has meant Senate-style “closed-list STV” with party tickets. Albeit some consolation that NSW local councils, and the Victorian upper house, have semi-optional preferences among candidates, while the NSW upper house allows optional preferences among lists.

    For this reason it is hard to answer Colin Hughes and Antony Green – two of Australia’s leading electoral gurus – when they argue that open-list PR would be better than “STV” (ie, the “mainland Upper Houses” version) in terms of combining proportionality with simplicity and voter choice. I don’t say I agree, just that it is hard to muster a defence of STV that isn’t vulnerable to sound-bites about “Robert Wood!” and “Steve Fielding!” Tasmania and the ACT are small in population, small in area and loom smaller than do other jurisdictions from the national media consciousness.

    Moreover, I’ve found that replying “Robson rotation means no Woods-es, no Fieldings, no Colstons and no Belinda Neals” often then attracts the counter-reply “yes, but it’s costly, complex and slower to count.” As a halfway house I would recommend an abbreviated version where (a) candidates within each group are listed “randomly-alphabetically” (ie, if you draw Round T by lot, then candidates ROU-Z go top, with candidates A-ROT below them), (b) two versions of the ballot are produced, and (c) the second version reverses the order of the first. Fairly easy to count, but mucks up attempts to dictate a how-to-vote order and helps distribute a larger team’s vote (more) evenly among its candidates.

    Now, since this thread is about the Bundestag… Didn’t the German Constitutional Court take a small step in the direction of prioritizing proportionality over local representation by holding that, if a party had overhang district seats, it could not fill casual vacancies in those seats from its list. Thus, over a 4-year term, attrition would move the overall numbers somewhat closer to nationwide proportionality. Highly random, of course, and reinforced by the German statutory rule that district MPs are not (unlike NZ) replaced by by-elections, but (usually) by the next contender on their party’s list.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 05 August 2012 @ 06:50

44. Alan @42: “Until 1918 FPTP applied in house elections and an elector faced the same restrictions as under a closed list PR system”

    There’s a difference between “You can vote for one single candidate only, and cannot indicate any second, third or later preferences” vs “You can vote for one party list only, which will deem you to have expressed second, third, and later preferences for these N candidates in this fixed order.”

    An “originalist” approach to sections 7 and 24 could allow truncation of preferences by statute (ie, FPTP and MNTV) while still ruling out a deemed compulsory order of preference where you can’t vote for [1] Kevin Rudd on the ALP list without automatically voting for [10] Craig Thompson on the same list.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 05 August 2012 @ 06:54

45. @Tom

    I am afraid I do not see the difference at all in terms of what the court may decide. I’m not advocating closed list PR, just noting that it’s unlikely to attract the same constitutional infirmities as federalised list MPs. FPTP is pretty much a closed list except there is only a list of one.

    Seed planted by Alan — 05 August 2012 @ 10:58

46. A modified form of MMP, DPR Voting, removes both the problems of overhang, and List MPs.

    By using parliamentary vote values, all MPs are elected as constituency MPs and each Party can exercise votes in the parliament proportional to their vote in the election.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 05 August 2012 @ 20:15

47. Stephen, that may or may not be a valid alternative electoral system, but it is not a form of MMP (modified or not).

    Seed planted by MSS — 05 August 2012 @ 20:55

48. A proxy system also won’t represent those who voted for the runner(s)-up. If the elected district MP won with 50,000 votes, it should make a difference whether his or her rivals polled 10,000 votes or 49,999 votes among them.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 05 August 2012 @ 21:14

49. Tom, assuming that this is the system Stephen is referring to, it does in fact take into account votes for non-winning candidates. But Stephen, I agree with MSS that “MMP” isn’t the right term for DPR—in what sense do you consider it to be “mixed-member”?

    Seed planted by Vasi — 06 August 2012 @ 00:33

50. In 2010 the Australian Greens win a single seat in the House of Representatives. They received 1,458,998 votes. Now Adam Bandt is a very good MHR but I’m not sure it’s desirable for any single individual to exercise 11.7 of the votes in the house. In 2007 the Greens won no seats, receiving 967,789 votes. It’s not immediately obvious why the Greens should, under DPR, get no votes in the house in 2007 and 1,458,998 votes in the house in 2010.

    Seed planted by Alan — 06 August 2012 @ 02:04

51. It looks like under the DPR proposal, the Greens in 2007 would have had representation via the confusingly-named “automatic election” clause. This apparently means that, having exceeded some threshold of total vote percentage but not elected any constituency MPs, the party leader would be granted an “exceptional” at-large seat. However said leader would only receive a vote of weight 1 in parliament, instead of whatever weight she deserves thanks to the party vote. It’s a bit arbitrary, but somewhat less so than what Alan thought.

    Unfortunately the sample election on the DPR site doesn’t add up correctly. If Party F gained an at-large MP, the total number of MPs should add up to 651. Stephen, could you clarify what’s going on there?

    I’d also be very concerned about the treatment of independent MPs, each being allocated a vote of weight 1. Voters who elect independents end up having their vote count twice, similarly to MMP. But also, any party which is likely to have a good seat ratio (and thus a low vote weight per MP) would be better off running all its candidates as “independents”.

    Seed planted by Vasi — 06 August 2012 @ 06:32

52. Even with the automatic election (which in fact recreates list MPs under another name) why then should minor parties and independents be so extraordinarily limited as opposed to major parties. One would have expected the automatic party leader to get as many votes as their electoral standing entitled them to. Ditto independents. And what are the parliamentary implication of Adam Bandt exercising 11.7% of the parliamentary votes in his own right?

    You also get a very delicate question arising from Adam Bandt’s situation. The Green candidate in the neighbouring electorate, Ms Wonderful, is wildly charismatic and popular. But if Ms Wonderful gets elected Adam’s parliamentary vote drops by half. There are certain temptations there…

    Seed planted by Alan — 06 August 2012 @ 06:51

53. @MSS, Vasi,
    The DPR Voting process is similar to MMP and counts the votes to achieve similar ends.
    The vote for the Party confers proportionality on the whole.
    The vote for the Individual constituency MP elects the MP but does not affect the parliamentary party’s votes.

    It is of course not ‘mixed member’ because all members are elected as constituency MPs.

    With both DPR Voting the overall Party parliamentary votes are proportional, but with DPR Voting there is no overhang problem.
    Because with DPR Voting all members are constituency MPs, it deals with the problems in MMP associated with mixed members.

    DPR Voting has not been formally validated (or invalidated). How are electoral systems validated?

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 08:06

54. @Alan,
    These are two important aspects.

    The 2010 Vote: As the sole representative of the Green Party in the parliament, Adam Bandt has a heavy vote conferred on him by the Green Party, and thus exercises their total vote (11.7 votes). How this works out in practice would be a matter for him and the Green Party. However it does mean that the Green Party has a vote in the parliament proportional to its election vote.

    The 2007 Vote: You are correct that in DPR Voting a small party could end up with no representation. However it is difficult to translate votes from one election to predict the result of an election under a different system.
    Campaigning and voting would be rather different. Eg There would be more constituency seats contested than in a comparable MMP election.

    Small parties would put much more emphasis on winning at least one constituency seat.
    In the UK smaller parties are relatively more effective at winning constituency seats, despite the fact that the vote for the party is conflated with the vote for the individual.

    The system also allows for the election of a single party MP with a single vote if the party achieves an agreed threshold, but fails to win a constituency.

    Nevertheless, DPR Voting would tend to limit the number of small parties present in the parliament.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 08:14

55. @Vasi,
    Thanks for pointing out the example error. You are right that the example should have been based on 650 constituency MPs.

    I agree ‘automatic election’ may be a confusing term. I am open to suggestions.

    The issue of running ‘false’ independents is dealt with here
    http://www.dprvoting.org/DPR_in_practice.htm#Abuse

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 08:58

56. I suggest that large parties would carpet bomb any electorate where there was the remotest chance of a minor party winning. I am interested in the rationale for the punitive measures against independents and minor parties. It seems to me a fundamental flaw if a discrimination against independents and minor parties is actually designed into a system and I wonder why you have done it.

    My first impression is that this would be a gift to the major parties.

    Seed planted by Alan — 06 August 2012 @ 09:31

57. @Alan 56
    ‘ ….punitive measures against independents and minor parties.’
    DPR Voting is designed to replace FPTP as used to elect the House of Commons in the UK, while retaining the single member constituency system.

    Compared with FPTP, Independents and small parties may expect to do better in a DPR Voting election because the vote for the individual is no longer conflated with the vote for the party. This also works for small parties if they can put up at least some well respected / popular / hard working / charismatic / local candidates.

    MMP might be considered an alternative, but DPR Voting means no change to the existing constituencies and no List MPs.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 10:39

58. @Stephen

    I accept all that. What I am asking is why you need to distinguish independents and minor parties as you do. As I understand it an MP’s vote is V/M where V is the votes received by the party and M is the number of members elected by the party. In fact your example gives the case of Party E and F who receive identical popular votes but E gets 17.5 parliamentary votes and F gets 1. Why? I realise one wins a constituency and one does not.

    Further I think it is radically unfair to clump the independents into a confected party. There are 3 official independents in the House of representatives. 2 are in broad agreement on most issues. The third takes very different policy positions and in fact gave his confidence to the Coalition rather than Labor. Why should independents not simply get the same formula as everyone else?

    Seed planted by Alan — 06 August 2012 @ 16:14

59. @Alan, (part 1)
    An important part of this electoral system is that the individual MPs are elected as a result of election contests in small local constituencies. The smallest geographical area is best because the electorate has the best chance of knowing, or knowing about the candidates most directly, hence the single member constituency.

    ‘Automatic election’ allows for a party that fails to get a single constituency representative to have some representation in the House, but not a proportional vote, only a single vote.

    I understand that this appears arbitrary, which it is. It could be decided differently.

    However a consequence is that it is important for each party to contest the local constituency elections. If the candidate elected by ‘Automatic election’ had the same heavy vote as the single directly elected candidate (as per the example) it would diminish the importance for small parties of contesting the constituency elections.

    I think for democratic reasons, the candidates of every party should be examined by the election process.
    To a lesser extent political parties that have a certain level of popular support (the threshold) should be represented in the parliament, and thus have their party and policies examined more carefully than would otherwise be the case.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 21:28

60. @Alan 58, part 2
    I am worried that I haven’t grasped your point.
    Independent candidates are elected as individuals without party allegiance. There is no party vote for them to share. By definition their vote is always ‘non party political’ so they have a (default) vote value of one.

    This also applies to party sponsored MPs when they vote on any issues that are agreed by all the parties to be ‘non party political’. They have a vote value of one. This seems to me to be both logical and consistent.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 06 August 2012 @ 21:53

61. I am assuming that independents can appear on both the party and the representative ballots. If not, why not? Indeed what is the purpose of the party ballot except to ensure the existing Big Three in the UK remain the Big Three?Seriously you seem to have included a number of arbitrary devices whose only effect is to entrench the existing major parties at all costs. Admitting their arbitrariness is not an argument in their favour.

    On the broader point, elections are not about parties or candidates, they are about electors. You propose a system where the electors of Party E are counted as being worth 17.5 times the electors of Party F. That is a fairly radical step and needs a great deal more justification than you have provided.

    Seed planted by Alan — 07 August 2012 @ 01:16

62. > “The smallest geographical area is best because the electorate has the best chance of knowing, or knowing about the candidates most directly, hence the single member constituency.”

    I dispute this very strongly A number of times as a constituent I would have much preferred to approach an MP who was not “my” “local” MP – whether because of the former’s party allegiance, or their greater expertise, or simply because I knew them personally. I have moved house a lot so I find electoral boundaries quite arbitrary. In one case I lived at the far end of one or another electoral district and was much nearer the the office of an adjoining district’s MP than to my own district’s.

    Having handed out how to vote material at polling booths I have noted that numerous voters want to vote for a particular candidate of their own party who has a high profile in the region (usually due to hard work) and get quite annoyed when told that they have to vote for someone they have never heard of (or from) because of a line on a map.

    It is true that STV uses electoral districts as well but, since these cover whole regions rather than dividing them, the above problems are much less likely to occur.

    To my mind, the fact that MMP preserves single-member districts is a bug, not a feature – especially when their role is rather like caged animals in a zoo because it’s the party list that really counts.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 07 August 2012 @ 02:05

63. @Alan 61
    In DPR Voting, only qualifying parties appear on the party ballot. Independents are individuals, not parties, and do not appear on the Party ballot. They only compete in the constituency contest where the description on the ballot paper is ‘Independent’.
    The purpose of the party ballot is to measure the support for each party, much like MMP, This is then used to share out the parliamentary votes in a way proportional to the number of votes each party gets in the election, which is fairer than FPTP.

    I think it is dangerous to draw firm conclusions about how voters will exercise their votes when the electoral system is changed. DPR Voting will tend to restrict the number of parties present in the parliament, depending on where the vote threshold is set (and how the party qualification rules are drawn up). However it could make it easier for small parties to be represented in parliament, and for independents to be elected.

    For Parties there are in effect three thresholds – Party qualification, the threshold level of votes, and the election of one constituency candidate. Any party who fails to pass one of these thresholds will be disadvantaged compared to others that succeed. Thresholds can be considered arbitrary, but serve a practical purpose and can be modified in the light of experience.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 07 August 2012 @ 08:29

64. @Stephen

    I am forced again to ask ‘Why?’ Merely restating an arbitrary design feature, especially one that can make for massive inequalities between electors, is not an argument for it.

    Seed planted by Alan — 07 August 2012 @ 09:17

65. @Tom Round 62
    The proposal that constituency boundaries should ideally follow the boundaries of natural communities seems key to your argument.

    Most people would agree with this proposition, but often boundaries and communities do not coincide for reasons of the overall fairness of the electoral system (the attempt to reflect the relative strengths of the different parties), or political advantage (gerrymandering).

    A feature of DPR Voting is that constituency boundaries can be redrawn at will without affecting the outcome of the Party vote, so boundaries could be redrawn to follow natural communities of different sizes with only limited implications for Party political fairness.

    If boundaries are drawn so that they are logical in respect of natural communities, are smaller constituencies more democratic than larger constituencies?
    The smaller the constituency, the closer the electorate can be to the candidates. That is, closer both geographically, and in terms of their knowledge of the candidates, and this seems to me a democratic positive.

    Is a multimember election more democratic than a single member election?
    A multimember election puts more demands on the electorate to absorb more information about the larger number of candidates in order to make an informed choice.

    I suppose your attitude to MMP, DPR Voting or STV depends on your concept of the elected representative. Do you prefer one single local representative for a smaller geographical area, or do you prefer a looser arrangement – MMP and the additional List MPs, or STV and the choice of several MPs covering a larger area? I think there is much to be said for making politics as local as possible.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 07 August 2012 @ 11:37

66. @Alan 64
    DPR Voting combines electing members in single member constituency elections with a separate poll of party support. The system, as designed, encourages every small party to compete in at least one constituency election.

    If achieving the threshold level of Party votes gave the same representation regardless of whether or not the party competed in any constituencies, there would be no incentive for small parties to compete in any constituency elections, as can occur in some MMP elections.

    In my view this would undermine the significance of the local constituency election, and weaken the credentials of the system as a democratic alternative to FPTP.

    As designed, DPR Voting is intended to replace FPTP as used in the UK to elect the House of Commons. It can be compared with but is not intended as a replacement for MMP.

    Seed planted by Stephen Johnson — 07 August 2012 @ 13:23

67. Maybe this intervention comes far too late, but I really would like to see the thread remain (mostly) focused on the issues raised by the German constitutional court, and how MMP systems deal with overhangs and compensation.

    Seed planted by MSS — 07 August 2012 @ 20:37

68. Alan (41),

    My argument has nothing to do with preferential voting. Our Constitution requires senator and MHRs to be “directly chosen by the people”. Thus, any voting system that prevents the people making a direct choice of individual candidates is unconstitutional. A closed list prevents them making a direct choice and is thus unconstitutional. First past the movable post, preferential and STV (even with the option of above the line voting) allow a direct choice and are thus constitutional. The Constitution was written when first past the movable post was the standard voting system in the colonies and must be read as accepting that system, poor though it is.

    Tom (42),

    Above the line voting is simply one of many millions of orders a voter can choose to make a direct choice of candidates and is thus, I believe, constitutional. If the option of voting below the line were removed, it would then become unconstitutional.

    I think the constitutional position with open lists is uncertain, but out of respect for the host’s request (67), I will leave the argument for another occasion.

    Seed planted by Chris Curtis — 07 August 2012 @ 22:24

69. Well then, to interrupt with boring old German MMP, in reply to Rici from the weekend (no. 40):

    The representation of the East was certainly skewed at the 2002 election, but on the other hand over-representing the other parties there would not necessarily be better for those PDS voters. I think this is mostly a failure of the alternative threshold to recognise regional voices that perhaps ought to be represented.

    On overhangs I agree with you that they should be baked in during the national calculation, but I would not deprive other Land lists of any whole Hare quotas they have earned (this would have been more elegant in old Hare/Niemeyer days). If this proved inadequate, one could also add Ausgleichsmandate.

    A potential problem with the latter is if small, geographically concentrated regional parties got overhangs (or as in NZ, a Maori Party). In an extreme scenario hundreds of extra seats could then be needed just to offset a few. The opposite danger (i.e. letting associated Land lists take much of the hit for overhangs, but not guaranteeing national proportionality), is that parties would formally decouple some of their strongest areas. As long as three constituency seats were certain and overhangs were possible, fake CSU parties could be created with little mathematical risk.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 08 August 2012 @ 00:30

70. Wouldn’t Germany’s issue have been solved simply by calculating all seat allocations at the national level by party, with additional seats added for overhangs?

    This party amount would be fixed then. And then allocations would be made based on national party vote. If this results in an overhang for one party in one state, the process is iterative, and simply reduces the other’s states allocation for that party until all of the party’s fixed national total are allocated.

    This seems incredibly simpler and would effectively reduce overhangs since the overhangs would be adjusted more easily at the national level.

    I think the reason that this has been done this way was due to Christian Democrats’ overhangs in certain states.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 08 August 2012 @ 14:29

71. Espen,

    I agree that it would be odd to compensate other parties in the East in 2002 for the failure of the PDS to reach the threshold. But I don’t see this as a failure of the alternative threshold; rather it shows that the 5% threshold is far too high. The PDS achieved a national total of 3.99% in that election, and that should have been sufficient to give them list allocations.

    Similarly, in 1990, Grüne failed to reach the threshold, receiving only 3.8% [fn1], and the West was consequently underrepresented (slightly), You can see this peak also on the graph in my spreadsheet (Choose the sheet “Summary” rather than “Data”.)

    So it seems to me that setting the threshold to two or three percent instead of five would improve both district and party proportionality, and enfranchise more voters. As I said before, that would be my first reform.

    As to overhangs, I think computing the overhang nationally would suffice in pretty much all cases. The only question is how to actually do this. I think this is more difficult with Hare/Niemeyer than it would be with Sainte-Laguë (which otherwise produce very similar results).

    I probably wasn’t very clear in my earlier post (and I don’t think I’d thought it through sufficiently). Here’s a possible allocation algorithm: First compute the total national allocation per party, as per the pre-reform system. (I’d use Sainte-Laguë here, too, but it doesn’t make much difference). Then, for each party, reserve the directly-elected seats in each Land and proceed with the Sainte-Laguë algorithm until the entire allocation computed in the first step is distributed. (That is, while working down through the quotients, if you hit a pre-reserved seat, just skip it and go on to the next quotient; otherwise assign it and reduce the number of seats to allocate by one.)

    That will have the result that in Länder with an “overhang”, the party will receive no list seats, and in a few other Länder they will receive fewer list seats (probably one fewer) than they otherwise would have won. The allocation of other parties will not be affected at all. This does not solve the district over-representation problem, but in practice I think that problem is not very drastic. I’ll try to do some more simulations when I get another free moment.

    I definitely think adding compensatory overhang seats (or however you want to call these) for other parties would be a mistake. As you say, it has the potential to blow up the parliament to gigantic proportions, in the event that the overhang belongs to a small regionally-concentrated small party (or pseudo-party created for the purpose).

    Germany does not appear to have such parties at the moment (unless you consider Die Linke to be one [fn2]) but it seems that they can show up at any time.

    fn1. That only tells part of the story. In 1990, the recently incorporated East had a separate threshold, and in the East the Greens ran as part of the Green/B90 alliance which did win representation, although their national vote was only 1.2%. In the West, Grüne reached 4.7%, and all of those voters were effectively disenfranchised. The two lists combined would have just made the threshold, by my reckoning. That same year, the PDS achieved representation with only 2.4% of the vote, due to the split threshold (I think), and in the next election it made the threshold by electing four MPs from the nominal list, although it only reached 4.4% of the vote.

    fn2. It seems to me that the PDS and Die Linke are regional parties in the sense that the NDP is a regional party in Canada and not in the sense that the Bloc Québécois is; they are not parties which pursue a pro-region agenda, but rather parties whose support tends to be in certain regions. The distinction is not arbitrary, because in the latter case, the pattern of support is much less fixed, as the Canadian example shows.

    Chris (and others),

    Please don’t feel that you cannot continue your discussion. Just choose a more relevant thread to continue it in. AIUI, F&V threads are never closed, precisely for this reason.

    Seed planted by rici — 08 August 2012 @ 15:11

72. Rici and Nick,

    My quarrel on overhangs is when these come entirely at the expense of the other Land lists of a party. This is fine up to a certain point, but if the internal geographical distribution becomes too predictably skewed, it creates a win-win incentive to de-link some lists for partisan and regional gain*. I am not a big fan of federal Ausgleichsmandate, but here they would certainly remove the partisan incentive.

    The simplest way to do my calculation is to first determine which is higher for each Land list: The number of associated constituency seats, or whole Hare quotas (which now having done the math, I will amend to one 598th of all valid and invalid votes). Added up, these minimum party totals could then create overhangs in light of the Sainte-Laguë calculation of 598 seats (whereupon Ausgleichsmandate could potentially also be created). Finally, geographically unallocated seats would be distributed using basically the same method as rici’s.

    In 2009, your proposals would have resulted in a Bundestag of 601 seats. The CSU would have kept their three overhangs, whereas the CDU would have kept none, for a total of 173 seats. Since the latter also happened to win 173 constituency seats, there would have been no seats left over for its Land lists. In Brandenburg the party would have gone from five seats to one, in Bremen from one to zero. However, by strategically de-linking Land lists, the CDU could have optimally recouped about as many seats as they now have overhangs (two thirds of which in two Länder only).

    My proposal would have resulted in a Bundestag of 613 seats, and removed nine overhangs from the CDU. These would have been kept at the exact limit set by the court – not to be mistaken for absolute proof of constitutionality (though the 2009 election was the most skewed one yet in terms of overhangs). Ausgleichsmandate would have added another 35 seats for a total of 648, but valid methods limiting these could probably be devised.

    * This is not entirely farfetched: The two areas with the most secure overhangs (and three-seat minimums) within the CDU, Baden-Württemberg and Sachsen, both have long-standing non-Prussian regional identities. Also, it is doubtful if name changes would need to go beyond “CDU B-W” or if contacts with the mother party would need to be greatly affected.

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 09 August 2012 @ 01:28

73. Espen,

    Just so I get your method your formula for seats to be awarded to a party within a state would be

    M=min(s,max(f,h))

    where:

    M=mandates won by a party in one state
    s=saint lague allocation based on percentage of national vote of national saint lague allocation for the party based on its national vote
    f-SMDs won in the state
    h=national hare quotas (adjusted to include spoilt votes) won in that region by the party

    and where s or f is greater than s, additional augsleichmandate would be added.

    One question, you included spoilt votes, what about votes for below threshold parties (I’m assuming right now, those would be included as well).

    Please confirm if I’ve screwed anyhing up. Now to my response rant

    Any two-vote MMP system (and even one vote MMP systems) already provides significant incentives to de-link parties in regions where a party has significant chances at winning SMDs. It would not be a national allocation system that would provide much more incentive, would it?

    Germany is basically begging for a decoy list. And some might argue, the separate existence of the CSU would be such an example.

    Really your issue is with MMP. MMP will always provide a de-linking incentive for parties likely to win SMDs.

    A system which would actually neutralize that incentive would be one-vote “scorporo” (as previously used in the Italian senate).

    Moreso, your example only met the court’s threshold of 15 seats at the exact threshold. What if the next election is more wonky?

    Finally, your proposal is fundamentally less proportional by increasing the overhang count. I have not yet calced the Gallagher Index on it. But I’d assume the Rici and I’s suggested approach would be much closer to a desired proportional outcome at the party level.

    You’re basically increasing pluralty bonus to ensure the regions which voted less for the plurality party are represented in the government.

    BTW, could someone explain to me how the court putting a cap on extra extra seats is more proportional? Do they realize that awarding extra seats actually results in more proportionality?

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 09 August 2012 @ 02:38

74. Sorry, I think I need to revise my understanding of the formula.

    M=max(max(s,f),h)

    M=mandates won by a party in one state
    s=saint lague allocation at state level based on percentage of national vote (but adjusted for SMDs on an iterative basis) of national saint lague allocation (inlcuding overhangs at national level if needed)
    f-SMDs won in the state
    h=national hare quotas (adjusted to include spoilt votes) won in that region by the party

    Sorry again please confirm.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 09 August 2012 @ 03:08

75. Nick,

    Let me instead go through each step of my proposal more thoroughly:
    1. Current thresholds are respected.
    2. Take that largest number for each Land list (either constituency seats won by associated candidates, or whole Hare quotas based on list votes). Add them up nationally for each party.
    3. Calculate 598 seats nationally using Sainte-Laguë.
    4. If a party receives more seats nationally under point 2 than under point 3, they keep these as overhangs.
    5. I did not commit to Ausgleichsmandate since they may not be constitutionally necessary.
    If added, they would be calculated nationally to offset overhangs created under point 4. This is easily done by using the national vote/seat ratio that is lowest among the parties and applying it as a quota to the others (with normal rounding). It may be constitutional to find ways to limit the number of such seats.
    6. If a party receives more seats under point 3 (and 5) than under point 2, these are distributed among its Land lists using Sainte-Laguë (taking into account minimum seats under point 2).

    I use all valid and invalid votes as a basis for my national Hare quota under point 2. This is however just a pragmatic way of ensuring that parties keep most of the Land list seats that they have “earned”, or could have recouped had they de-linked lists near-optimally, while somewhat limiting their number so that more constituency seat overhangs can be absorbed during the national calculation.

    Now to your fine “rant”:

    “[MMP] already provides significant incentives to de-link parties in regions where a party has significant chances at winning SMDs. It would not be a national allocation system that would provide much more incentive, would it?”

    Let us leave out issues of constituency candidates having incentives to de-link from their Land lists, since none of our proposals deal with that. Currently, German MMP does not however give an incentive to de-link one Land list from another, since overhangs are all added to the total of each list. Your national allocation system would create such an incentive to de-link, whereas mine would only do so in a negligible way.

    “Really your issue is with MMP.”

    Possibly true in one sense, since letting Hare quotas based on list votes create overhangs is arguably in violation of basic definitions of MMP. Generally, I tend to favour small adjustments that limit perverse incentives.

    “[Y]our example only met the court’s threshold of 15 seats at the exact threshold. What if the next election is more wonky?”

    The 2009 election was the most severe test so far, but hypothetical courts could well strike down my system. I would then rather add a few Ausgleichsmandate than further cut list seats.

    My proposal would however have prevented ALL overhangs until 2009. If instead my national Hare quota kept using only above-hurdle votes as a basis, some overhangs would have remained: In 1994 six for the CDU, in 1998 seven for the SPD and in 2005 four for the SPD. In 2009, six more would have been added to the CDU.

    “[Y]our proposal is fundamentally less proportional by increasing the overhang count.”

    Compared to yours this is correct, unless parties started strategically de-linking their lists due to the new incentive to do so. Compared to the current system (before and after the 2011 reform) it is more proportional. I never really had a problem with the minor disproportionality caused by overhangs. But then the court deemed negative vote values for parties to be unconstitutional, which seemed to throw the validity of virtually all overhangs into doubt. Now it suddenly says fifteen would be fine.

    “BTW, could someone explain to me how the court putting a cap on extra extra seats is more proportional?”

    They set a cap on overhangs, but not on additional seats restoring proportionality. I too found the cap arbitrary and confusing. Did you read the reasoning behind it, rici?

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 09 August 2012 @ 18:23

76. Epsen,

    Thanks for your feedback and for your good description of your proposal.

    A couple of points to which I’d like to respond immediately. It’s a little late for me to give a fullsome response including raising new topics. The following relates more to direct refutatation:

    “Currently, German MMP does not however give an incentive to de-link one Land list from another, since overhangs are all added to the total of each list.”

    This is actually completely untrue. The negative vote weight in fact encourages de-linking. I believe, the CDU would have had a negative vote weight in Bavaria had it not been for the fact that its two component parties are split.

    The fact that party votes have not been de-linked more previously should be a sign that parties are much less likely to pervert an MMP system in Germany, despite the clear benefit.

    This is further supported by German parties’ reluctance to introduce decoy lists to take advantage of the two-vote MMP issue.

    “Compared to yours this is correct, unless parties started strategically de-linking their lists due to the new incentive to do so. ”

    Your comment leaves out on one point. Both systems would still reward strategic de-linking. Your system would still result in a benefit from strategic de-linking. The benefit would only be less in your system, because it’s inherently less proportional to begin with. However, assuming both systems were subject to strategic de-linking, your proposal would still be less proportional in absolute terms (I will work out a good example to provide a response in a day or so, if this is not immediately evident, but my current level of sobriety does not support that).

    “the court deemed negative vote values for parties to be unconstitutional, which seemed to throw the validity of virtually all overhangs into doubt. ”

    Negative vote values do not exist solely due to overhangs. It was strictly due to the fact that the previous German national allocation system did not account for the first past the post seats won by the party.

    For instance, assume everything in the old system had remained constant, except when the national seat total was allocated the starting “n” in the v/(n+1) was equal to the SMDs won. This would in fact eliminate the negative value weight.

    While I acknowledge that your system equally eliminates the negative value weight, it really is only because the initial “n” has been changed from 0 to the number of SMDs won. (Please note that any iterative largest remainder method would have the exact same result).

    Overall, your premise is contingent on the fact that somehow a national allocation system would result in a perverse incentive to de-link, and that this is worth increasing the system’s gallagher index significantly to offset that incentive.

    However, this incentive has always existed, and has only been used by the CSU to date. So there’s no empirical evidence to justify that fear.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 10 August 2012 @ 02:36

77. Espen, the Constitutional Court says: “Die Wahlrechtsgleichheit und die Chancengleichheit der Parteien sind bei einem Anfall ausgleichsloser Überhangmandate im Umfang von mehr als etwa einer halben Fraktionsstärke verletzt.” which I think means that they think that a deviation from (party) proportionality of 15 seats (halben Fraktionsstärke) is acceptable, but more than that is too much. The Fraktionsstärke is, not coincidentally, the value of the 5% threshold, so my interpretation is that the Court believes that proportionality can be approximated in units of about half a parliamentary fraction. In other words, the 5% threshold is justifiable because any party which fails to meet it would also fail to achieve status, and therefore over-representation of a party (due to overhangs) of about this amount is also acceptable, given the need to balance.

    So the issue is not growth of the Bundestag (there is a comment about this, though, which indicates that they are concerned with the practical aspects of unrestricted growth), but rather proportionality of representation.

    I didn’t read it as requiring a cap, although I suppose that a cap would be one possibility. I don’t see how you could implement that, though: you would have to declare some constituency elections invalid if they exceeded the overhang. In any case, they are looking for a solution which will counter the tendency to an increased number of overhang seats. They consider it likely that the number will continue to increase, so they see the 2009 election as part of a tendency, rather than an exceptional event. So I don’t think they would be favourable to a proposal (like yours) that would only achieve the 15-overhang guideline in the case of the 2009 election but would exceed it in the future.

    I have to say that my understanding of their reasoning leads me to believe that a 2.5% threshold would be much more reasonable than the existing 5% threshold.

    The issue of negative vote weight is separate from the issue of overhangs, and I think your proposal does not solve this problem. So I don’t see how it would be acceptable from that viewpoint either.

    Seed planted by rici — 10 August 2012 @ 13:09

78. Rici,

    The only means I see by which Epsen’s proposition might have a neagtive vote weight would be where votes in one state where a party had an overhang would push the national hare quota higher resulting in that same party possibly losing out on a “hare quota” seat in another state.

    Is this where you’re going with it? I can reason a reason a situation, though it would likely be remote. I guess it would still be unconstitutional.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 10 August 2012 @ 16:37

79. Nick, precisely.

    The reason this is not as unlikely as you think it is is that in a state where the nominal election results in a lot more seats than the proportional distribution would, quite a few votes can be added without altering the total seat allocation. On the other hand, you probably don’t have to change the pseudo-Hare quota much to reduce the allocation in some other state.

    Of course, this only works with “new” votes; transferring a vote from some other party doesn’t affect the pseudo-Hare quota. Under German law, you cannot abstain from just the list vote. However, consider a CDU voter in a Land with a large number of constituencies in which the CDU is a walk-in, but suppose that the voter lives in a different constituency in that Land; one in which the CDU candidate doesn’t have a chance. Now, I claim, that voter could plausibly make the strategic decision to abstain. Her abstention from the first vote has no effect, since her candidate isn’t going to win anyway. Her abstention from the list vote will have no effect on CDU representation in her Land, which is determined by constituency elections. But it might reduce the pseudo-Hare quota enough to give the CDU more seats elsewhere. (It might help other parties too, but lowering the quota helps parties with a large vote proportionately more.)

    I believe the Court would frown on a system in which strategic abstention was reasonable, since it is an instance of the negative vote problem. But I could certainly be wrong.

    Seed planted by rici — 10 August 2012 @ 20:40

80. Rici,

    Thank you for that summary under no. 77, which is the only one I have read making any sense at all. It still seems terribly arbitrary, but I can see their reasoning. Crucially then, the court did not simply clarify the bounds within which its previous ruling could legally be implemented, which I assumed had created a loophole (that could have facilitated compromise somewhere between the political blocs). Instead it created an additional and separately applicable constitutional standard regarding disproportionality itself.

    If this is correct, of course I agree that as a consequence my proposal is inadequate in its current form. As you both have concluded, it runs afoul of negative vote values and almost certainly of the new disproportionality standard as well.

    However, since your proposal lets the CSU keep its uncompensated overhangs and creates a new incentive for some Land lists to de-link from each other (see my response to Nick below), it too may be in violation of the proportionality standard. If the CDU de-linked only two predictably overhang-prone lists in 2009, in addition to the CSU, this would have given a total of 17 uncompensated overhangs.

    I am coming to the conclusion that we must all either exclude the weakest constituency winners (who instead could be first in line to fill vacancies), or move to some kind of full compensation of overhangs through Ausgleichsmandate (possibly only at the Land level, which would be horrible). One could probably also find ways to chip away at more of the overhangs themselves, or change the system in more fundamental ways by forcibly linking or de-linking lists or by cutting more categories of list votes. Back to the drawing board.

    Politically, it may however in the end be hard to avoid full national compensation. If the CDU/CSU now realises this, the least controversial and most expedient solution is probably to simply graft this on top of the seat allocation system that existed in 2009.

    Nick,

    On de-linking Land lists: We may be talking past each other due to the word “incentive”. Today, it may occur that in retrospect a party realises it could have achieved luckier allocations by de-linking some of its lists. The party will not however be able to predict ahead of the election which particular lists to de-link in order to reap that potential reward.

    In 2009 the CDU actually lost a list seat in Niedersachsen by not being linked to the CSU (the latter would have kept the current seat as an overhang). Likewise, in 1994 the CDU missed out on another net overhang (both under Hare/Niemeyer and Sainte-Laguë) despite Bavarian seats not being affected. In 2002 the CSU would have lost a seat to the CDU in the internal allocation. These effects which by themselves basically amount to rounding errors in either the national or internal allocations can just as easily backfire as be beneficial.

    So I can see negative vote values here, which is important in principle, but I see no incentive to change behaviour.

    This marginal effect is completely overshadowed by the potential reward associated with overhangs themselves, which in addition often can be predicted with accuracy. But today, no list seats in other Länder are cut simply because overhangs occur somewhere else. Under your and rici’s proposal they would be cut, and I see being created a very large incentive to de-link overhang-prone Land lists.

    As you say, the upside of optimally de-linking would roughly be the same in my proposal, but the downside of NOT doing so would be much, much lower (at the admitted expense of overall proportionality). Given that there will be political and mathematical risks to de-linkage, I still think that parties would be less willing to game the system in my scenario. We will never know for certain.

    Under no. 78, you have a very good point on my national Hare quota.

    Regardless, this all feels very unreal now that my proposal has been ruled unconstitutional by a unanimous panel of three at Fruits & Votes!

    Seed planted by Espen Bjerke — 11 August 2012 @ 12:59

81. Alright, so let’s assume we’re working with some modification of the 601 seat version (national allocations).

    How do we address the constitutional court’s limitation on overhangs.

    I think we end having to invalidate constituency elections. This would be particularly true if “vote doubling” becomes a common strategy of CDU voters by voting FDP in the second tier. Or even worse, decoy lists.

    This type of system would reduce MMP to PR but with a more direct election mechanism (choosing a significant portion of members through election).

    The other option is unfettered assembly growth, which would in theory would eventually reqiure a cap in which case, a mechanism for invalidating candidates would be required.

    Let’s say no extra seats are allowed and the assembly size is fixed at 598. This is not a requirement, I’m just using this for argument’s sake. You could instead create a cap of 30 extra seats, with at most 15 being allocated to overhang mandates and 15 being used to balance. But again, you would still require a mechanism to eliminate some SMD winners.

    In 2009, how would we eliminate the 3 overhangs allocated to the CSU in the last election?

    My proposal, eliminate those with the lowest proportion of the vote in their ridings.

    An alternative might be lowest: (proportion of votes)-(winning margin).

    Not sure if this is overly simplistic. Has anyone ever heard of a proposed system where SMDs were eliminated; I am pretty sure it’s never been done in practice.

    Seed planted by Nick Anand — 11 August 2012 @ 18:34

82. Reuters reported last week that Germany has passed a new electoral law that “grants smaller parties compensation seats for any overhang seats.”

    According to the article, had the new law been in place in 2009 – when CDU and CSU won 24 overhang mandates, which increased the size of the Bundestag from 598 to 622 – “there would have been an extra 49 compensation seats awarded to the other parties and would have thus raised the number of lawmakers to 671.”

    JURIST has additional links here on Germany’s new electoral law.

    Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 27 February 2013 @ 01:26

83. While reading Germany’s old electoral law, it seems like Germany actually has a compensatory majority bonus like that found in Malta. It has not ever been put into place because no party has won more than 50% of the second [list] votes since after World War II (the CDU-CSU won more than 50% in 1957, but they’re officially different parties). I would assume this hasn’t changed but I’ve yet to be able to find the text of the new law in English or Spanish.

    “If a party whose Land lists have received more than half of the total number of second votes in the electoral territory of all the Land lists to be taken into account does not receive more than half of the seats available according to the distribution of seats described in subsections (2) and (2a), further seats shall be allocated to the Land lists of that party in the order of the highest number of remaining votes until the Land lists of that party have received one seat more than half of the seats to be allocated in the electoral area. In such an event, the total number of seats (Section 1 subsection (1)) shall increase by the difference.”

    Seed planted by Chris — 27 February 2013 @ 04:51

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