Leveling seat

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 Leveling seats (Danish: tillægsmandat, Swedish: utjämningsmandat, Norwegian: utjevningsmandater, Icelandic: jöfnunarsæti, German: Ausgleichsmandat), commonly known also as adjustment seats, are an election mechanism employed for many years by all Nordic countries (except Finland) in elections for their national legislatures.

The 310 fixed seats are distributed among the 29 electoral districts (Swedish: valkretsar) according to the largest remainder method with the Hare quota.

In the first stage, the fixed seats are distributed within each district according to the modified Sainte-Laguë method (jämkade uddatalsmetoden) with the first divisor adjusted to 1.2 (1.4 in elections before 2018).

In the second stage, the 349 seats are distributed through a calculation based on the total number of votes summed up across the entire country.

In the third stage, a summary is made of the fixed seats that the parties have achieved, and this is compared to the outcome of the nationwide distribution above.

[3] Its current form is based on the following principles: In the 2005 elections, the average number of votes on a national level was largely similar across party lines.

[5]) An illustration of this came in 2005 when Vera Lysklætt of the Liberal Party received the last leveling seat, in Finnmark, with 826 votes.

[6] In the 2009 election, a programming fault in the software calculating the allocation prognosis for one county made their leveling seat go to another party.

[7] That changed the outcome in two other counties, and it took over a week and a recount until the distribution of leveling seats was finally decided.

Traditionally, Germany's mixed member proportional system awarded overhang seats with no compensation at the national level.

This led to a particularly notorious case of negative vote weight after the 2005 German federal election, where voting was delayed by two weeks in constituency Dresden I; it was determined that too much support for CDU would cause the party to lose an overhang seat in the close election.

[8] In February 2013, a resultant decision of the Federal Constitutional Court determined negative vote weight was unconstitutional, and demanded a reform of the electoral law.