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by Lionel Wijesiri

Now that the General Election is over, it's a good time to look at different voting methods practised in other countries and see whether our system suits us very well.

Elections lie at the heart of representative democracy, enacting citizens' rights to have a say in by whom they are governed. The electoral process is the ultimate symbol and act of modern democratic societies.

However, no consensus exists among academics as to which electoral system of carrying-out elections can be said to lead to the most fair and most effectively shaped representative democracy.

All electoral systems seek to take account of at least one common feature : Ensuring a representative parliament. Parliaments should reflect the population that chose it, both in terms of political support, but also regionally and ethnically. They usually include as wide a cross-section of views as possible.

Majoritarian systems

Majoritarian, or plurality, systems represent the oldest and simplest electoral system category.

The following three varieties of majority systems operate on the basis of single-member constituencies:

First Past the Post electoral system

The first-past-the-post electoral system is a voting system for single-member districts, plurality and in political science, it is known as Single-Member District Plurality or SMDP. This system is in use at all levels of politics and is very common in former British colonies including the United States, Canada, Australia, and India.

In this system, each voter selects one candidate. All votes are counted and the candidate or option with the most votes is the winner.

First-past-the-post encourages the tactical voting technique known as "compromising": voters are encouraged to vote for one of the two options most likely to win, even if it is not their most preferred option.

SMDP is good at ensuring that the plurality of voters are represented and that all local geographical areas have a voice in the legislature. It also tends to reinforce the two-party system, and to produce stable single-party majorities in legislatures. It does this by making it difficult for third parties to elect their candidates.

This also serves as a check on small extremist parties. On the other hand, this voting system also tends to misrepresent parties, encourage gerrymandering, create high levels of wasted votes, and deny fair representation to third parties, racial minorities and women.

Two-round runoff voting

This system requires a candidate to obtain one more vote than half the votes cast in order to be elected. If no candidate gets that many votes, the field is cut down to the top two candidates who received the highest number of votes, and a runoff election is held.

This system is designed to solve one of the obvious problems of plurality voting: the possibility of electing a candidate that was supported only by a minority of the electorate in the district.

France and Monaco use TRS for legislative elections . Several developing countries that came under French influence also use this system.

Political Attributes.

The two-round runoff system is only a slight modification of the single-member district plurality system, and it is really only designed to address one of its problems - the possibility of a plurality winner - which it does eliminate. In addition, it brings with it two more problems: the added expense of a second election, and the lower voter turnout that usually plagues those second elections.

Instant runoff voting

This system also seeks to ensure that a candidate is elected by an absolute majority, but does so in a single round using Preferential Voting (i.e. expressing a rank order of preferences) instead of the latter two-stage system. Constituents vote for a single candidate but indicate, in declining order, their preferences for other candidates.

If none of the candidate gets an absolute majority on the first count, the candidate who polled the fewest votes is eliminated, and his preferences are distributed among the remaining candidates. This is repeated until one of the candidates has an absolute majority. This is used in Australia and for the Irish presidential elections.

IRV has the advantage of the two-round system - ensuring a majority winner - while avoiding its major disadvantages: the added expense and lower voter turnout of a second election. However, being in the plurality-majority family of voting systems, IRV shares most of the political disadvantages of this winner-take-all approach.

Proportional systems

While majoritarian systems provide the oldest model for electoral systems, proportional representation (PR) systems are also widely used today. Its focus is on the creation of a parliamentary chamber which accurately reflects the diverse make-up of an electorate.

The two main PR system categories are Party List and Single Transferable Vote. Both of these carry a range of considerations in creating representative parliaments.

There are many different forms of proportional representation. They use different ballots and different ways of counting votes. But all PR systems do have two things in common - two ways they differ from the plurality voting system.

First, proportional representation voting systems elect people in multimember districts. Instead of one member of the legislature being elected in a small district, PR uses much larger districts where five, ten, or more members are elected.

So instead of only one winner, there are multiple winners of office in each district. The second difference is that these multiple seats are distributed according to the proportion of the vote won by particular parties or political groups. Many systems used include a threshold which aims to reduce the extent to which proportionality is taken.

By putting in place a minimum level of national support required for a political party to be allowed to gain parliamentary representation, it limits the ability for very small parties to gain representation.

Some thresholds are nominal, others are so large that it challenges the basic idea behind using a PR system. In some countries, political parties not reaching the thresholds and getting no seats can potentially waste millions of votes.

MMP has a number of advantages over plurality-majority voting. It produces more accurate representation of parties in legislatures, while also ensuring that each local district has a representative.

It gives voters more choices of parties at the polls, increases voter turnout, wastes far fewer votes and reduces the creation of manufactured majorities. In addition, it assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women.

MMP creates two different types of representatives, those who represent districts and those who represent parties. Finally, like all PR systems, MMP usually results in coalitions governments, not single-party governments.

Mixed systems

There are a range of systems which try to strike a balance between majoritarian and proportional representation systems, and are generally categorised as Mixed Systems.

These can broadly be divided into those which try to bring together elements of majoritarian and proportional systems to try and come up with a seat-distributing mechanism incorporating the best of both world (but end up tending to lean more towards one system or the other), and systems where both majoritarian and proportional mechanisms are used in different stages.

These varieties are from the former, and slant towards majoritarian systems: Cumulative or Block Vote.

In this 'multiple First-Past-The-Post' system, used in Thailand and the Philippines for example, voters have a number of votes equal to the number of seats available and are free to distribute them as they please among all the candidates, even to the extent that one candidate can receive all the votes of one voter, or conversely, where the voter can give each candidate one vote. Seats are distributed among candidates polling the most votes.

A variation of this is Party Block Vote, where voters are only allowed to vote once for one entire party list, which results in the entire list of candidates of the winning party list taking all the seats in a multi-member constituency. Most MPs in Singapore and Ecuador are elected using variations of this system.

Cumulative voting tends to yield more proportional representation of parties than plurality-majority systems. Political and racial minorities also have a better chance of fair representation under this system.

On the other hand, cumulative voting is usually less proportional than fully proportional systems. And at times, political and racial minorities may be denied representation entirely - especially if these groups nominate too many candidates.

The main problem is that this system is inconsistent in its results: sometimes producing proportional results and wasting few votes, and other times producing grossly disproportional results and wasting many votes.

There are a number of other systems:

Single Non-Transferable Vote - Under this system, there are several seats to be allocated in each constituency. However, each voter may only vote for a single candidate, with those candidates who gain the most votes being elected.

Additional Member (or Parallel) system - A proportion of seats are distributed using a majoritarian method, while the remaining seats are allocated using a PR system, usually on a regional or nationwide basis. The Russian Duma, for example, has seats elected by a majority vote in single-member constituencies, as well as by PR nationally. Japan is also a user of this system.

Mixed Member Proportional system (MMP) - This system works very similarly to Additional Member, in that it incorporates majority voting for one portion of the seats and Party List PR for the other.

However, "under MMP the list PR seats compensate for any disproportional situation produced by the majoritarian system-elected] district seat results.

For example, if one party wins 10% of the national votes but no district seats, then they would be awarded enough seats from the PR lists to bring their representation up to approximately 10% of the parliament".

This 'compensating' mechanism system is used in Germany, Hungary and New Zealand, and is seen as particularly beneficial in its ability to keep local constituency representation while also awarding smaller parties their fair share of the popular vote.

Voting systems, then, can have a variety of important political impacts. So while at first glance, the study of these voting procedures might seem to be a boring exercise, it quickly becomes clear that these rules can have some very significant and wide-ranging political implications.

Once you begin to investigate voting rules and to follow the trail of political effects emanating from them, you soon start to uncover some provocative links between voting procedures and a number of serious issues surrounding the elections.

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