Early parliamentary elections were held in Iceland on 25 and 26 October 1959.

[1] Following the electoral reforms made after the June elections, the Independence Party won 16 of the 40 seats in the Lower House of the Althing.

[3] The electoral system at the time was rural–urban proportional representation: a lower tier comprised single member constituencies elected using first-past-the-post voting, two-member constituencies elected using party-list proportional representation (party-list PR) and one large multi-member constituency for Reykjavík that also used party-list PR, topped up by an upper tier of eleven seats chosen from a single national compensatory list.

[4][5] The reforms saw the replacement of this rural-urban proportional system with a two-tier party-list PR system; the lower tier now comprised eight multi-member constituencies, all elected using party-list PR.

[6] The voters’ capacity to change the order of names on the PR lists was greatly reduced compared to prior elections as well; the existing Borda count-based system was now only being used to calculate one-third of the final number of votes deemed to have been received by each candidate, while the party’s unaltered ordering determined the remaining two-thirds.