The use of electoral thresholds hinders the proportional distribution of seats to election contenders. The d’Hondt formula that is applied to exactly distribute the seats after the exclusion of the contenders that didn’t pass the election threshold favors the entities with the highest score on account of those that didn’t pass the threshold, said the executive director of ADEPT Association Igor Boțan.
He reminded that the snap parliamentary elections of July 11 are held in accordance with the absolute proportional representation system: a country – an electoral district. The 101 seats of MP are distributed only among the election contenders that pass the election threshold: 5% for political parties; 7% for electoral blocs and 2% for independent candidates.
The d’Hondt formula is described in Article 95 of the Electoral Code. This provides that after all the votes have been tallied, successive quotients are calculated for each party. The party with the largest quotient wins one seat, and its quotient is recalculated. This is repeated until the required number of seats is filled. The total votes cast for each party in the electoral district is divided, first by 1, then by 2, then 3, up to the total number of seats to be allocated for the district/constituency. Say there are p parties and s seats. Then a grid of numbers can be created, with p rows and s columns, where the entry in the ith row and jth column is the number of votes won by the ith party, divided by j. The s winning entries are the s highest numbers in the whole grid; each party is given as many seats as there are winning entries in its row.
“The approximate formula enables to calculate the seats with a deviation of one seat for each of the entities,” stated Igor Boțan.
He noted that the parliamentary elections of 2001 involved 27 election competitors: 17 political entities and ten independent candidates. None of the independents reached the threshold of 3% and only three entities passed the threshold of 6%. After applying the approximate formula, the votes (percentage) of the three parties totaled 1 137 689 and 71.67%. The PCRM won 71 seats, the BEAB – 19, while the PPCD –12. For verification, the obtained seats are added together: 71 + 19 + 12 = 102.
“Additional rectification is needed to obtain 101 seats. The d’Hondt system disadvantages the parties with lower scores. So, one seat was withdrawn from the PPCD, which gained the lowest number of votes,” explained the expert.
