Every citizen of our country has the right to choose government bodies. When casting a vote for a particular candidate or party, not everyone thinks about what is the way to determine the election results. Meanwhile, there are several of them.
It is the difference between these methods that underlies the concept of an electoral system. How to understand who won the elections, how many votes need to be collected, and how many percent of these votes?
There are three types of electoral systems:
(is a combination of the first two types)
In the Russian Federation, citizens elect the president, deputies of the State Duma, as well as heads of constituent entities. The most significant elections at the federal level include and. For them, two different systems are used at once. Majority is used in presidential elections, and mixed since 2014 in elections of deputies to the State Duma (in the period from 2007 to 2014, a proportional system was in force).
What is their essence?
Presidential elections
The President of Russia, like the President of France, for example, is elected by an absolute majority of the majority system. That is, the scheme is 50% of the votes plus 1 vote. If the candidate does not gain more than 50%, then a second round of elections is appointed, which will include only two candidates with the largest number of votes. Such a situation developed in Russia in 1996, when the country was choosing between Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov.
In some countries, for example, the USA, Canada and others, there is a system with respect to the majority, when a candidate simply needs to get the most votes, and not necessarily more than 50%.
Election of deputies of the State Duma
The State Duma consists of 450 deputies. Voters elect half of them according to the majoritarian system, that is, they vote for a certain person. They are elected by constituency. One constituency - one deputy in the lower house of parliament. Moreover, such a candidate can be nominated both from the party and independently. And 225 more deputies are elected by the voters according to the proportional system, voting for the party. The number of seats (mandates) in the State Duma is set in proportion to the number of voters' votes, that is, the more percent of votes a party has, the more seats it will get in the lower house of the Russian parliament. Parties that do not overcome a certain threshold do not enter the lower house of the Russian parliament (in the history of the Russian Federation, such a threshold was set from 5 to 7%).
