The division of the conservative vote that caused the irruption of Vox in the last elections of April 28, 2019 and the possibility that the new party of Íñigo Errejón will have a similar effect on the left in the face of the elections have once again put the accent on the Spanish electoral system, based on a proportional distribution of seats in accordance with the so-called Ley d’Hondt.
The aforementioned norm is an electoral system of proportional calculation that divides the number of votes cast for each party by the number of elected positions that each constituency has (in the Spanish case, the 52 provinces and the autonomous cities: Ceuta and Melilla).
What the D’Hondt Law establishes is that, in a constituency in which, for example, 5 deputies are distributed, the total number of votes that a party has received must be divided into a kind of table by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, that is, the elected positions that are disputed in each constituency. Of all the results obtained, the five deputies are assigned to the five highest figures, regardless of the party they are. This implies that the last to receive a seat does not necessarily have to coincide with the party with the least votes and seats.
For this reason, the number of seats distributed by each province is key, depending on the population, although taking into account that there is an initial minimum of two deputies per province, something that marks the . This minimum causes imbalances to occur and seats are more ‘expensive’ in and more ‘cheap’ in number of votes in inland provinces with less population.
Thus, in a system that was directly proportional, in a parliament of 350 deputies, Madrid would have 48 representatives according to its electoral census, while Soria would not even have one deputy (it would remain at 0.72). In order to ensure that all Spaniards are represented in Congress regardless of where they live, this proportionality is adjusted so that all constituencies have representatives.
The following graph from Europa Press shows the number of seats to be distributed by each province of the 350 that Congress has:
This other graph from EpData shows the votes needed to get a seat in each province:
Putting figures on the table, the 3.81 million voters in Madrid elected 37 deputies in April (102,222 votes per seat), while the 79,427 voters in Teruel elected 3 deputies (some 26,027 votes per seat).
In Madrid or Barcelona, where more than 30 seats are distributed, the distribution of seats is more proportional, in the sense that the different political options voted for by the inhabitants of these provinces are more likely to be reflected in the seats that are distributed.
Meanwhile, in provinces like Soria or Teruel, where only two or three seats are distributed, it is more difficult, since only the parties with the most votes will reach Congress and the rest of the candidacies voted for by the inhabitants of that province will be left without representation. Or what is the same, there are fewer seats to distribute and therefore the possibilities of obtaining one are more limited.
This series of peculiarities makes it particularly important who gets the last seat for each province. As specified, the d’Hondt Law implies that, after counting all the votes, the number of votes on each list is divided by a quotient that represents the number of votes required to obtain a seat. The result for each match will normally be made up of an integer part and a fractional remainder. First, each list is assigned a number of seats equal to its integer part. This will normally leave some seats unallocated. Then the parties are ordered according to their remains, and the parties with the largest remains get one extra seat each, until all the seats are distributed.
This map reflects who took that last seat in April, these being the seats most vulnerable to changing color in the electoral repetition:
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