Pacific Scoop: How parliamentary seats will be allocated in Fiji’s election

Thomas Carnegie
Parliamentary seats in Fiji’s proportional voting system will be allocated through a mathematical formula called the D’Hondt method.

Victor D’Hondt was a Belgian mathematician who created the system in 1978. It allows fractional voting amounts to be converted to whole numbers.

This guarantees parties an exact number of seats in parliament while aiming to preserve proportionality as much as possible.

The steps below show how D’Hondt’s method will allocate seats in Fiji’s Parliament:

Step 1: Totalling the votes
Total votes for all candidates are counted and totalled.

Step 2: Independent and party votes calculated
Votes received by each candidate will then listed in descending order and the total vote for each party is established.

For independent candidates, their total vote will be recorded from step one.

Step 3: Determining the Five per cent threshold
To win a seat in Parliament, an independent candidate or party is required to achieve five per cent of the overall number of votes.

To determine the threshold the following formula is used: total number of votes cast x 0.05 = threshold.

For instance if 500,000 people vote then this number is multiplied by 0.05, giving the result of 25,000. This means an independent candidate or political party must receive 25,000 votes to win a seat.

If they do not reach this vote threshold they will not qualify for a seat in parliament and votes they receive will be excluded from step 4.

Step 4: Determining the number of seats
The total number of votes for each party and independent candidate is tabled.

This is done by dividing the total votes of each remaining party and remaining independent candidate by one. For parties, but not for independent candidates, the total is then divided by two, and then by three, then by four and so on.

This is done up until a party’s total number of votes have been divided as many times as the number of candidates a party is running.

There are 50 seats in Parliament. The 50 highest figures on the table then determine the number of seats each party receives in parliament.

Step 5: Allocating seats
Seats are allocated to candidates in their parties based in order of the votes they receive. For instance the candidate who receives the highest number of votes is given first priority. The candidate who receives the second highest amount of votes is given second priority and so on until all 50 seats are allocated.

Fiji Elections Office

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