The Election Process

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Election Process Voting system There are 4 main voting systems: First-past-the-post system Supplementary vote system Additional vote system Single Transferable vote system First-past-the-post system This system is used in elections for the House of Commons, there is only one seat per each constituency e.g. East Sussex, West Sussex, Kent. People can vote for one candidate of their choice. They can’t vote for more than one candidate or more than once. Therefore, the candidate who gets the most votes is being elected. Main advantages of this system are that it produces more stable governments with little need for coalition and there is close tie between MP and constituency. Main Disadvantages of this voting system are that proportion of candidates for a party elected is not equal to votes cast. Proportional Representation (PR) system Opponents of First-past-the-post system claim that Promotional Representational system is fairer. The main advantage of this system is to ensure that the number of candidates elected for a party is in proportion to the number of votes cast. This system gives a better chance to smaller parties. The main disadvantage of this system is that it may lead to weak government as coalitions are often created and it increases possibility of huge arguments forming in the government, which then might cause government to fall and then another election will be needed. Supplementary vote (SV) system. This system is used for elections where there is only one person to be elected. This election is used to elect Mayor of London. Voters need to choose two candidates when voting- 1st choice and 2nd choice candidates, if a candidate receives majority 1st choice votes then he is elected. If not, then all candidates apart from top two are estimated and second choice voters redistributed to remaining candidates. The main
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