A thread on how your votes translate into seats for political parties a #SriLankaElections2020 This is straight out of the Constitution [Article 99(5) - (9) & 99A]
EVERY VOTE COUNTS, even if you can't help a party win in your district, it still counts for the national list [1/10]
Each voter can cast ONE vote for a political party & up to three preferences for candidates nominated by that political party. So REMEMBER your vote counts, so go vote tomorrow bright and early #LKAElections2020 [2/10]
The total seats in Parliament are 225,
Only 29 seats are allocated proportionally (National List),
174 seats are allocated proportionally among those who get more than 5% of votes in each Electoral District
22 seats are First Past the Post [3/10]
There are 22 electoral districts, the party that gets the HIGHEST number of votes in each electoral district automatically gets one seat from that electoral district. This doesn't have to be a majority of votes in district, just need to get the most number of votes [4/10]
How District seats are decided, The votes obtained by any political party that got LESS than 5% of the total votes polled in that electoral district are deducted from the total votes polled in that district, the result is referred to as the “relevant number of votes” [5/10]
"The relevant number of votes" is divided by the number of MPs to be elected from that electoral district minus 1 (See tweet 4) if the result is an integer & a fraction (i.e. 24.6) it is rounded up (i.e. 25). The resulting integer is referred to as the “resulting number” [6/10]
Starting with the Party that received the highest number of votes, the votes received by each political party in that district is then divided by the "resulting number". Each political party wins one seat for each whole number produced by this division [7/10]
After this allocation is done & if there are sill more seats left to distribute among political parties, then the remaining number of votes for each party is compared and the parties with the largest remainders are allocated the remaining seats [8/10]
The 29 National List seats are distributed proportionally among all political parties contesting the election. You take the total votes polled in the country & allocate it based on the total number of votes polled by each political party in the entire country. [9/10]
For the National List seats, there is no cutoff mark of 5%, So even if a political party does not get 5% in the entire country they are still eligible to be considered & sometimes can in fact win a seat. The Sihala Urumaya in 2000 won 1 seat with 1.47% of the vote [10/10]
This is a modified version from part of a paper i co-authored for @welikalaa & @CPASL the full paper "A SYSTEM OF ELECTORAL REPRESENTATION FOR SRI LANKA: THE PRINCIPLES BEHIND THE CHOICE" is available at constitutionalreforms.org/wp-content/upl… #ShamelessPlug [11/ 10+1]
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