Thread by @KevinRothrock

It seems that United Russia performed so poorly in the Kirov region that “Russian agent” Maria Butina, who was the number 2 candidate on the party list there, won’t get to join the Duma, as expected. (The party could still bring her in, but more on that later.)

I decided to do a little thread here about how proportional representation mandates are awarded in Russia’s system because I tried looking this up and the explanations I found were in Russian and are a tad convoluted.

First, just to refresh your memory, recall that the State Duma’s 450 seats are awarded by a mixed system: 225 in “single-mandate,” first-past-the-post races (United Russia always dominates these), and 225 in party-list voting (United Russia dominates here a bit less).

The single-mandate races are straightforward: whoever wins the most votes (even if only narrow, and even if it’s far short of a majority) wins the seat. The allocation of party-list mandates is complicated as hell.

First, the Central Election Commission calculates the “first electoral quotient” by taking all the votes cast for the parties that won more than 5% of the total (about 50.2 million last weekend) and divides it by 225. That equals about 223k. So that’s the 1st quotient.

Now take each party’s vote total and divide it by 223k. For United Russia, that’s 28,064,350 divided by 223,007.6, which equals 125.85 — so, boom, the party gets 125 seats. After some fun with fractions, United Russia gets an additional seat (KPRF and Just Russia, too).

So UR has 126 party-list seats to dish out (separate from the 198 seats its candidates won in various single-mandate races across the country). Subtract 5 from 126 b/c UR listed 5 top candidates federally: Shoigu, Lavrov, Protsenko, Shmeleva, and Kuznetsova. (More on this later.)

So now we get the “second electoral quotient”: the party’s vote total divided by the party-list mandates it has been awarded. For UR, it’s 28,064,350 divided by 121 = 231,936.78.

UR nominated a whopping 394 candidates, spread across 57 different “regional groups.” The party’s 121 party-list mandates are allocated to the regional groups that met the 2nd electoral quotient. For every 231,936 votes, a regional group crowns a deputy from its ranked list.

The exact party-list vote tallies for the Kirov region don’t appear to be published yet, but we know that United Russia won just 29.54% of the votes there. This must be lower than 231,936, which is why Regional Group #17 frontman, Governor Vasilyev, didn’t get a mandate, either.

HOWEVER, Butina still has a chance to enter the next Duma: another top candidate on one of UR’s other regional groups that did meet the 2nd election quotient could surrender his or her mandate to her. The federal-list figures could, too. (They’ll definitely surrender to someone.)

P.S. This allocation system is based on what is called the Hare quota. You can read more about it hare (get it???) if you’re weird like that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_quota