Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. This can occur through the redirection of preferences in ranked voting systems, but also can occur if a voter makes the wrong assessment and votes strategically for a candidate he thought was the least disliked of the candidates to win, later learning that his most preferred candidate did have a chance to win anyway. Ī vote can also be thought of as wasted (at least partially) when a vote has been needlessly given to a candidate who is a lower preference for the voter than a higher-valued candidate.

For example, the mixed proportional representation systems used in Germany and New Zealand exclude parties that fail to receive at least 5% of party votes (known as 'second votes' in Germany) cast from receiving seats they would otherwise be eligible for based on their party vote count.ĭespite suffering from wasted votes, small parties can sometimes wield disproportionate power in being necessary for the assembly of a coalition if they have any representation at all. The more candidates to be elected from one of its multi-winner districts, the lower the threshold and the fewer votes wasted.Īlso, different thresholds set by law waste votes. The natural electoral thresholds used by single transferable voting (STV) can waste some votes. In PR elections representatives are elected at least in rough proportion to voter preferences, generally resulting in fewer wasted votes than in plurality voting. In multi-member electorates, a partly exhausted ballot can help elect candidates before becoming exhausted, meaning the vote isn't entirely wasted. When not all candidates are ranked, ranked vote systems can produce exhausted ballots - ballots that could have been redirected to lower preferences had they been expressly ranked. Also, even votes that are not fully wasted are, in a sense, partially wasted by electing candidates that were not the voter's first preference. However, in single member ranked voting, the majority of votes will still become wasted votes in the final result, by being losing votes or excess winning votes in the final runoff. Ranked voting almost always produces fewer wasted votes than the number of wasted votes in plurality systems because ranked vote systems, by design, redirect what would otherwise be a wasted vote to another candidate. The efficiency gap has been called the most scrutinized method of measuring gerrymandering. In plurality systems, wasted votes are a basis of the efficiency gap measure, where the shape of electoral districts (or their existence) can be quantified to show just how imperfect such a system is at allocating voter preferences. Wasted votes can also be called unrepresented votes. When applied to ranked-vote systems it includes exhausted votes (votes where none of the candidates the voter ranked are elected). This includes lost votes (votes that are for a losing candidate or party), and excess votes (votes for winning candidates in excess of the minimum needed to win). In electoral systems, a wasted vote is any vote that does not receive representation in the final election outcome.

Define wasted