HRD’Hondt’s method – how mandates are calculated in Croatian elections
Although I thought we had written more or less everything we needed to about the D’Hondt method, there is never enough repetition. The article Elections 2011 Don’t blame D’Hondt for weak support! and related articles more or less explained everything about the famous D’Hondt method.
It consists in dividing the total number of votes received by each list by a series of divisors. This series consists of adjacent integers, in the specific Croatian case the series 1,2,3,4,5, ending with 14, the number of mandates elected in each electoral unit. Mandates are given to those lists that contain the 14 highest quotients. The aforementioned legal electoral threshold of at least five percent of the vote is a kind of qualifying match for each list to participate in the distribution of mandates, but passing it does not guarantee that it won at least one mandate.
This time I will give you a specific tool for calculating mandates, and also show the correct way of calculating mandates from research using specific examples.
Download the tools in Excel at the link https://bit.ly/dhondtmodel and you have two elobarated situations – when you convert percentages from research into mandates (there are no undecided voters, so you have to distribute them proportionally) and when you have the number of wasted votes and provisional results, so you calculate mandates.
The first example is from yesterday’s survey by HRT for the 8th electoral unit– HRejting: Results of the last poll before the elections: 5th and 8th electoral units. You enter the result of the survey, you get a recalculated rating and you see who crosses the threshold at that moment – you do not enter or delete those who do not.
The result is 6 -4 – 2- 1-1 – the ordinal number of mandates is indicated – the edge mandat is 14.
Given that the research error is +-3.9% – IDS+PGS (Istria and Primorje regional parties) get only 1.7% more for the 3rd term, but it is not lost to SDP (Socialdemocrats), but to HDZ (Christian Democrats). And that’s the thing, you can never fully predict how the votes will fall on election day itself.
That is why it is always important to look at the results of previous elections, where trends in the results can be followed.
2020.
2016.
2015.
An interesting case is when a party crosses the electoral threshold of 5%, but fails to win a mandate, as was the case with MOST (Conservatives) in the V. electoral unit in 2020.
.
If MOST had received only 274 more votes, they would have received a mandate, and HDZ would have had one less
I hope that we were able to further describe how D’Hondt’s method works – and follow all the news related to the 2024 Croatian elections in our section Politics and elections.
Tags: D'Hondt, parliament election in Croatia, politics in Croatia, elections 2024, Croatian 2024 elections, elections, croatian elections, Croatian politicsAlso read following…
