What Is the D'Hondt's System

In the proportional electoral system the candidates for members of parliament do not run individually, but rather as part of the collective list of a certain party, coalition or group of citizens. Therefore, at elections conducted according to the proportional system one does not vote for an individual candidate but for the list of a party or coalition.

When on Sunday citizens turn out at the polling stations, they should know in what way seats in parliament will be distributed according to their votes. First of all, in the proportional electoral system the candidates for members of parliament do not run individually, but rather as part of the collective list of a certain party, coalition or group of citizens. Therefore, at elections conducted according to the proportional system, one does not vote for an individual candidate but for the list of a party or coalition. Finally, let us ask what the proportional system is. The answer is simple: it is a system in which a party running in the elections gets, in principle, as many seats in parliament as is the percentage of the votes it wins. For instance, if 10 members of parliament are to be chosen in one constituency, and if a party wins 40% of the votes, then that party would get 4 seats in parliament. This practically means that, according to the rule (which, as we will later see, does not apply to our elections) the first four candidates on the list would become members of parliament. However, things start complicating when this, in principle, simple electoral system is applied on the real electoral situation. Let us explain this on the following example. Ten members of parliament have to be chosen and three parties took part in the elections winning, 52%, 34% and 14% of the votes respectively. According to the basic proportional system, these parties should get 5.2, 3.4 and 1.4 seats in parliament respectively, which, of course is impossible, because the number of seats in parliament much be a whole number. There are several methods for resolving this problem: one of them is the method of the biggest quotients, known as the D'Hondt's method (V. d'Hondt, Belgian mathematician). The number of votes which every party gets (or percentage, which boils down to the same), is divided, in succession by 1, 2, 3,...n, where n is the number of the members of parliament being elected in that constituency. Then all the quotients obtained in that way are put in order starting from the biggest ones and the first n quotients bring seats in parliament to a party. To go back to our example. Since ten MPs are to be elected, the results of our parties (52%, 34% and 14%) should be divided, in succession, by 1, 2, 3,... 10. We get the following:

52 : 1 = 52, 52 : 2 = 26, 52 : 3 = 17.3, 52 : 4 = 1.3, 52 : 5 = 10.4, 52 : 6 = 8.7, 52 : 7 = 7.4, 52 : 8 = 6.5, 52 : 9 = 5.8, 52 : 10 = 5.2; 34 : 1 = 34, 34 : 2 = 17, 34 : 3 = 11.3, 34 : 4 = 8.5, 34 : 5 = 6.8, 34 : 6 = 5.7, 34 : 7 = 4.9, 34 : 8 = 4.2, 34 : 9 = 3.8, 34 : 10 = 3.4; 14 : 1 = 14, 14 : 2 = 7, 14 : 3 = 4.7, 14 : 4 = 3.5, 14 :5 = 2.8, 14 : 6 = 2.3, 14 : 7 = 1, 14 : 8 = 1.7, 14 : 9 = 1.6, 14 : 10 = 2.4.

Here are the ten biggest quotients: 52, 34, 26, 17.3, 17, 14, 13, 11.3, 10.4, 8.7, so that the party that won 52% of the votes gets 6 seats in parliament, because 6 of it quotients (52, 26, 17.3, 13, 11.3, 10.4 and 8.7) are among the ten biggest; the party that won 34% of the votes gets three seats in parliament (its quotients are 34, 17 and 11.3), and the party that won 14% of the votes gets only one seat in parliament, because only one of its quotients (14) is among the first ten. The above mentioned example shows that with the application of the D'Hondt's method (but, of course, of others too) in the realization of the proportional system, the parties get the number of seats in parliament that does not fully correspond to the percentage of gained votes. The deformations of the proportional system are bigger as the number of MPs to be elected in a certain constituency is smaller. Not going into mathematical proof, we can say that the deformations are negligible if at least 100 MPs are to be chosen in a constituency. That was one of the reasons why the opposition asked for one constituency: in that one constituency there would be more than 100 MPs to be chosen, the deformations would be negligible and the results would be absolutely just. Let us just mention that the majority system, according to which one member of parliament in elected per constituency and according to which the party that wins the majority of votes gets the seat in parliament, can be considered the most deformed version of the "proportional" system. Namely, in that system there can occur a large disproportion between the number of gained votes and obtained seats in parliament. The upcoming presidential, communal and municipal elections will be held according to the majority system. As we said at the beginning, the elections for the Republican Assembly and the Federal Assembly's Chamber of Citizens will be held according to the D'Hondt's version of the proportional system, but with Serbia being divided into nine constituencies. Let us add a few more things to this. Only the parties, coalitions or groups of citizens that win at least 5% of the votes will take part in the distribution of seats in parliament. In other words, the lists which win less than 5% of the votes in a constituency are treated as if they don't exist. Therefore, the citizens who vote for anonymous parties and groups of citizens that cannot win 5% of the votes must be aware of the fact that their votes are wasted which suits the parties with the largest number of votes. (For this reason it is openly suspected that the forming of most of such lists was initiated by the ruling party.) After the application of the D'Hondt's method the seats in parliament will not necessarily be distributed from the top of the list. Concretely speaking, a party is obliged to distribute from the top of the list only one third of the seats in parliament gained in a constituency; it can give the remaining seats in parliament to anyone from the list. For instance, if a party won 6 seats in parliament in a constituency, it is obliged to proclaim the first and the second on the list members of parliament, while it can give the remaining 4 seats to anyone from the list. We hope that we have, more or less, explained the rules of the electoral system. We leave the most difficult part up to the voters - to vote wisely and maturely.

The citizens who vote for anonymous parties and groups of citizens that cannot win 5% of the votes must be aware of the fact that their votes are wasted which suits the parties with the largest number of votes.