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Why didn't the parties "Lider" and "Order, Law and Justice" not get a seat each, to which they would be entitled given their results stated in the article? According to [1] (in German), seats are distributed by the Hare system with no fixed lower threshold, so a party should get its first seat at about 3% of votes... --Roentgenium111 (talk) 20:55, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the answer and giving a link to the EP electoral law. So Bulgaria uses a variant of the Largest remainder method (with Hare quota) in that they distribute the remaining seats only between those parties that received at least one "full" seat, not between all parties?
But then, the Blue Coalition should have gotten a second seat, and the Citizens only 4 seats. (Blue C.'s votes divided by the national quota gives 1.35 seats, Citizens' gives 4.14 seats, so Blue C. had the larger remainder of the two.)
Also, this system seems rather disproportional to me, as it disadvantages (some) small parties even stronger than the d'Hondt system does (under which Lider would have received a seat). It de facto means that there is a fixed ~5.88% threshold for parties to gain seats, contrary to the European voting rules which do not allow fixed thresholds over 5%... --Roentgenium111 (talk) 21:13, 21 November 2011 (UTC) (I've moved my answer here from Talk:Lider (political party))[reply]
Playing around with a spreadsheet, I think I've worked it out (god bless google translate, considering it's Bulgarian electoral law, it's surprisingly readable!) - the method is laid out in the law, and it's very logical, when they repeat things it's not as an aide-memoire, it's because you do it again. So the stages are (1) divide valid votes (2576434) by seats (17) to get the "national quota" (2) remove all parties whose vote was less than quota, and re-calculate the quota (valid votes for parties over the quota is 2186523/17, giving a quota of 128,619). Party votes are divided by the new quota, and all the results come out to the seats awarded after rounding (Citizens gets 4.88, rounds to their awarded 5, Coalition gets 3.7 rounds to their awarded 4, Movement get 2.8, rounds to their awarded 3, Attack get 2.3 rounds to their awarded 2, Stability get 1.594 rounds to their awarded 2, and Blue get 1.592 which gets them the only seat left - had they got .00255 more, they'd have won the extra seat at Stability's expense).
Basically, it's a variable threshold, that moves depending on how the votes were distributed - if you're above it, you get seats of a certain number, if you're below it you get knocked out of any consideration.
As regards distortions.... well, every system has them, and this one is certainly unusual. I almost want to give them points for making it such an exercise to see how they got to their results, whilst being so apparently open and transparent ;) --Saalstin (talk) 23:35, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for working this out, this method does indeed give one the "correct" results. (I also used G. translate, but couldn't make so much sense of it...) But then the threshold is not really variable, it's always 1/17= 5.88% of the total votes, isn't it? The method you describe is equivalent to just usual Hare-Niemeier with a fixed 1-seat (=5.88%) threshold, IMO. This makes me again wonder how they could get it accepted by the EU... --Roentgenium111 (talk) 14:11, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome - it was fun :) Not with any access to the discussion, my guess would be they got it accepted because it's not intrinsically a 5.8% threshold - if Bulgaria ever gets awarded 21 seats, it'll be under 5% to qualify, it depends how many seats they have. There are other examples not dissimilar to this - in the UK we have theoretically no threshold at all, but in my constituency, the Greens won 9.3% and didn't get a single seat (under D'Hondt). Vagaries of electoral system :) --Saalstin (talk) 14:47, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're right about parties often not getting seats with >5% in smaller constituencies. But e.g. the Greens in your example would have received a seat with that same result if the votes had been distributed differently between the other parties (e.g. Conservatives losing 3% to the BNP). Bulgaria seems to be the only EU constituency where a party gathering 5.5 % has no chance at all of getting a seat, no matter the distribution of votes between the other parties. And I'd say that the threshold is almost as intrinsical as it can get: Presumably, it's much easier for Bulgaria to adopt a new electoral law than for the EU to change the seat distribution among countries. If they ever got awarded 21 seats, they could just change the threshold to a "1.2 quotae" before the next elections and keep their threshold well above 5%.... --Roentgenium111 (talk) 16:55, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
