Honduras 2017

Honduras has presidential and congressional elections today. I know essentially  nothing about the elections except: (1) There is widespread fear they will not be fair, and (2) The congress is elected by free-list PR.

It is for the latter reason that I share the following image, which I found on Twitter, posted by Pablo Secchi.

The ballot is similar to that in neighboring El Salvador, which also uses a free list. The voter may cast up to M votes, where M is the district magnitude (number of seats elected from the district). The votes may be cast without regard for party, but each candidate vote is also a vote for the list on which the candidate was nominated. Thus it is a party-list PR system, but one in which voters are free to spread their support across multiple parties. It also means that voters are weighted differently, according to whether they cast all their votes or not.

It appears that voters can simply cast a list vote. I believe that doing so is equivalent to casting votes for as many candidates as are nominated on that list (presumably always M).

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.