I was just reading this story from AP, which attributed to the Iraqi Electoral Commission the same final distribution of the 275 seats in the National Assembly that AP had reported– without attribution to the IEC– yesterday.
Namely that the Sistanist UIA list gets 140 seats, the Kurdish list get 75, the Allawist get 40, etc etc.
However, I think that further down the list of lists there may be a question about the allocation of one seat that the IEC gave to the Sadrist list (one of three that they allocated to it), which I believe may more legitimately have gone to the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Here is my table of calculations for how I believe the seats were being (or should have been) allocated.
The easiest way to understand the counting is to read the table from left to right. First of all, the number of votes recorded for each significantly-sized list is divided by 30,750, which as I wrote yesterday is the raw “number of votes per seat”. After that first distribution of seats, 256 seats have been clearly distributed. You then have two sets of votes that have not yet “contributed” to a seat: all the “remainders” from the dividing process for the bigger lists, plus all the actual votes from all the smaller lists.
Each list should, obviously, get to “keep” its own remainders (my column D). But down at the bottom of the list of lists, there are many lists that by no means of remainder-distribution at all could end up qualifying for a seat. I put that cut-off point after #13, the Iraqi Islamic Party, principally in view of the fact that the IIP clearly had gained more than half of a “seat”‘s-worth of votes, and the next list on the list clearly had not.
So I then redistributed among lists 1-13 all the votes that had not been cast for any of lists 1-13, on a basis proportional to the number of votes each of those lists had originally won (my column E there).
I then added the sums of columns D and E to arrive at a total for an allocation of votes at “round 2”. That was column F. Those votes were then aggregated into “seats”, using the same divisor as in round 1, generating the additional seats given in column G.
But there are still remainders, and still four seats to be allocated.
At that point, I allocated those four remaining seats to the lists with the highest remainders in column H, which were lists 1, 2, 9, and 13. Of those four “lucky” lists, #13 (the IIP) had by far the highest remainder in column H. That’s why I certainly would have allocated one of those four “third round” seats to the IIP.
During the IEC’s whole remainder-distribution process, it notably did not give a seat to the IIP; but it apparently gave one to the Sadrist list. I really do not understand why, since I can’t see any way of fairly organizing the remainder-distribution system that would have given them an extra seat there.
Plus, I repeat, the IIP had actually won more than 50% (actually, 69.4%) of the votes it would have needed to win a seat without any remainders redistributed to it, at all.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see the IEC’s explanation of its process.
(P.S. It feels so good to be scrying vote-tallying processes in Iraq rather than body counts.)
5 thoughts on “A question about Iraq’s vote-count”
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Helena, I think your calculations are logically incorrect. You should not be keeping the IIP in your calculations in the second round at all. The only way to get “remainder” votes to tally up extra seats is by dropping all of those parties which did not gain enough votes to win even a single seat (as the rules state). If you don’t drop IIP’s votes from the calculation, you should not drop anyone’s, and there is no need for this second round of calculations. The IIP came close, but they simply did not get enough votes (1/275 of the total) to win a seat. That’s how the process was set up.
Bill, you may well be right, if the rules indeed were that a list had to get win at least one seat in the first round to stay in the running.
I was trying to look for the exact vote-tallying rules. Do you have a source? I guess this UN FAQ talks about redistributions affecting only “subsequent seats (for lists that pass the natural threshold)”, which would imply that passing the “natural threshold is a first condition…
But if I were the IIP (which I’m not!) I’d be royally upset that my original “remainder” of 21,342 votes didn’t win me anything while for example Allawi’s original “remainder” of 443 won him an extra two seats.
There is a long and complex history of trying to pick the way of counting multiple party elections. For example, see this Scientific American article. The math and the logic can get quite complex. There is even a proof the problem is impossible to solve. It’s worth studying.
A system that was mathematically proven to be the most fair, though, might not be the best, if neither the candidates nor the voters understood it well enough to believe in it.
Hi Helena,
Personnally, I don’t see anything shocking in the fact that the 13th party didn’t get any seat, because he didn’t get enough ballots to have one complete seat. There are 275 seats in the new assembly. I find it normal that a deputy to that assembly has to get at least 1/275th of the ballots.
Compared to other countries, the threshold is still quite low : it’s not more than 0.36% of the voices. Here in Switzerland,for instance, there are thresholds of 5 to 7% depending on the states.
That kind of threshold is usually set in order to prevent the atomization in very small parties, because it push parties to make compromises and alliances. THere is a drawback however : it becomes difficult for new parties to pass the threshold. So the result is more stability, but at the cost of new ideas and parties.
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