In many elections around the world, with major exceptions being the United Kingdom and the United States, must elections occur using some form of proportional representation (PR). These leads to governemnts who if they are seeking long term positions of leadership having to form policies and allegiences with other parties to carry out the agnenda, which is closest to the majority view of the people.

Single Transferable Vote

One of the most common and easily explained forms of PR is single transferable vote (STV). Basically what happens is that each voter marks their order of preference 1,2,3 etc beside the candidates in the order their prefer. A quota is worked out by the following fomula:

Number of valid votes/(Number fo seats +1) +1

For Example

In this constiuency there are 2 seats. The threshold for election is the total number of votes (6000) divided by seats (2) plus 1 (2000) plus one (2001) Nobody acheieved this in the first round of voting.

So after the first round of counting Sam is eliminated as he only gained 750 votes. These are then reditirbuted to the people who were second preference on Sam's ballots.

Round 2

As you can see Ashley although only the third most popular candidate in the first round got the majority of the second prefeneces from Sam's supporters. Peta however is 114 votes clear of the quota and so her second preference votes will be reditributed between Abi and Ashley.

Round 3

This time Abi was the major gainer on transferred votes but she has not received enough votes to acheive the quota. However as there are no further candidates to eliminate Abi will be awarded the second seat with 1981 votes.

Party List Voting

This is used to elect more than one candidate for an area the major parties produce a list of candidates ie:

In this form of PR you vote for the Party rather than the indivuduals and the seats will be distibuted by the ranking of the parties. For this vote there are five seats

1st Round

So the Italics win the first seat and Peta is elected so they add one to their weighting making it twomaking the second round.

So the second seat goes to Shazz for the Post, who also add one to their weighting.

Round three

The Scottish researchers may have had the third greatest number of seats from the first round, however the weighted score of the Italics is higher so they get the third seat and Ashley joins Peta in being elected for the Italics.

Round four

The forth seat goes to the Scottish Researchers, now that the italics weighted total has sunk to 16,000, and Dr. E Vibenstein joins the names of those elected.

Round five

The last seat is generally the most hotly contested as the parties votes and various weightings reduce the size of the number of votes needed to win. In this case it is very tightly fought between the Italics who already have two elected, the Post who have one and the Church of the True Brownie who are still waiting to have gained a seat. However TCotTB are norrowly denied a seat by the Post and Pastey becomes the final representative elected in this vote.

Therefore the following candidates were elected, in order:

1. Peta Italics
2. Shazz The Post
3. Ashley Italics
4. Dr. E Vibenstein Scottish Researchers
5. Pastey The Post

A variation on the above would be where you have an open vote for each member of the parties. You votes would be added up for the party members but the order of their votes in the first round would decide their order on the ballot rather than the that being decided by the party in your area.

Mixed Member

The system combines a first past the post exercised in the UK and US allowing a representative who is directly tied to a local area and a regional vote for the part list as above, so that you views may be represented in you region.