Apparentment

Condorcet methods Positional voting Cardinal voting Quota-remainder methods Approval-based committees Fractional social choice Semi-proportional representation By ballot type Pathological response Strategic voting Paradoxes of majority rule Positive results Apparentment is the name given to the system, sometimes provided for in elections conducted according to the party-list proportional representation system, which allows parties to specify electoral alliances.

Under apparentment, parties combine their vote excess, which may yield an additional full quota and candidate elected.

If two parties poll 1.4 and 1.3 quotas respectively, they will probably only win one seat each if their votes are counted separately (assuming there is no further threshold, such as Germany's 5% barrier) but if they can combine their votes, they will have 2.7 quotas in total and a good chance of winning 3 seats overall.

In the election of the German Constituent Assembly in the 1920s, an unused vote could be used outside the original district to help a party get an additional seat.

[3] The system introduces an element of ordinality - a vote is first applied to elect a candidate or a party, then a group list.