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Going through the small print, in the third schedule to the bill, I have found out that the 5% figure relates to a share of the party vote not of all votes cast in the election.

The actual text of the bill.

"6 (1) Seats allocated in an electoral district to a party are to be allocated to its candidates in the following order--

(a) qualifying candidates, in order of the votes given for each candidate (largest number of votes first);

(b) other candidates, in the order in which they appear on the party list.

(2) A candidate is a "qualifying candidate" if the number of votes given for the candidate is at least 5% of the number of votes given for the party as determined for the purposes of paragraph 4(2).

(3) As between qualifying candidates with an equal number of votes, seats are to be allocated in the order in which they appear on the party list."

I am not sure that many individual candidates will get 5% of the list vote, because the elector has the choice to vote for a list OR for an individual candidate on the list (which counts as a vote for the list so far as allocation of seats is concerned). I imagine most electors will vote for the list or the lead candidate on it, so it would be quite unusual for one of the lower ranked candidates to reach a personal vote of five per cent of all the votes for the list.

by Gary J on Sat Jun 30th, 2012 at 07:46:03 AM EST
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That sounds like the Swedish rule (except for parliament where it is eight per cent, but lowering that to five has been discussed).

In effect, in larger constituencies, there will be safe seats for large parties. If Labour and Conservatives each take 35% in South East they get about six seats. For the first name not to enter six candidates need to not only get more then number one, but also more then five per cent of the party votes each. And since it is a large constituency, with lots of people that means that six lower ranked candidates need to get their message out to lots of people.

On the other hand, all seats in Wales can very well be sorted on number of preference votes. And small parties has no safe seats as it only takes one other candidate to get more votes in order not to elect the top name where the party gets one seat. So it is a non-sensical barrier that only makes sense from the perspective of large parties (guess that is why it is proposed).

Btw, I can't get to the pdf. Even with adjusting for the link being incorrectly written. Anyone else can? Is it UK only?

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Sat Jun 30th, 2012 at 02:49:51 PM EST
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I have sorted out a link which seems to work to a page on the parliament web site, which includes a pdf link to the text of the bill as introduced.

DoDo kindly inserted a link to the page about the draft bills which were put forward for pre-legislative consultation. Unfortunately I tried to replace that with a link to the bill as introduced, but got the syntax wrong. Sorry for the confusion.

by Gary J on Sat Jun 30th, 2012 at 08:44:06 PM EST
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