Parallel Voting - Procedure

Procedure

Under SM, which is a form of semi-proportional representation, a portion of seats in the legislature are filled by pluralities in single member constituencies. The remainder are filled from party lists, with parties often needing to have polled a certain amount, typically a small percentage, in order to achieve representation, as is common in many proportional systems. Any supplementary seats won by a party are filled from an ordered list of nominated candidates

Unlike mixed member proportional, where party lists are used to achieve an overall proportional result in the legislature, under SM, proportionality is confined only to the list seats. Therefore, a party that secured say 5% of the vote will have only 5% of the list seats, and not 5% of all the seats in the legislature.

The proportion of list seats compared to total seats ranges widely; for example, 18.7% in South Korea, 37.5% in Japan, 68.7% in Armenia, and 85.2% in Timor-Leste.