How does it work

Cards (1)

  • AMS works like this
    1. Figure 3.2
    2. Presentation (PR)
    3. Each voter has two votes - one for a candidate and one for a party
    4. Each constituency elects one candidate (using FPTP), whereby voters choose their preferred candidate
    5. Two-thirds of the seats are allocated in this way
    6. The other third of the seats are elected on the basis of closed regional list voting, whereby voters have an additional vote to select their preferred political party
    7. The country is divided into regions and each party offers a list of candidates for each region
    8. Seats awarded from the party list system are adjusted to give a more proportional result (using a complicated formula called the D'Hondt method)
    9. Parties that do less well in the constituencies have their proportion of list votes adjusted upwards
    10. Those that do proportionally well under first-past-the-post have their list votes adjusted downwards
    11. The overall effect is to make the total result close to proportional of the total votes cast