Open list

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 Open list describes any variant of party-list proportional representation where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a party's candidates are elected.

A "relatively closed" open list system is one where a candidate must reach a full electoral quota of votes on their own to be assured of winning a seat.

How many votes need to be altered in this way to have an effect on the results varies by the number of seats won by the party in the constituency or municipality in question and the candidate's place on the list.

[2] Norway: In parliamentary elections, 50% of the voters need to vote for a candidate in order to change the order of the party list, meaning that, in practice, it is almost impossible for voters to change the result and it is de facto a closed list system.

It should therefore be made clear in advance whether list ranking or absolute votes take precedence in that case.

In practice, with such a strict threshold, only very few candidates succeed to precede on their lists as the required number of votes is huge.

Where the threshold is lower (e.g. in Czech parliamentary elections, 5% of the total party vote is the required minimum), results defying the original list order are much more common.

The members of the National Council are elected by open list proportional representation in nine multi-member constituencies based on the states (with varying in size from 7 to 36 seats) and 39 districts.

Only candidates who have received more than 5% of preferential votes at the regional level take precedence over the list.

[6] For elections to the European Parliament, the procedure is identical but each voter is only allowed 2 preference votes.

In the European election in 2009 three of Slovakia's thirteen MEPs were elected solely by virtue of preference votes (having party-list positions too low to have won otherwise) and only one (Katarína Neveďalová of SMER) was elected solely by virtue of her position on the party list (having fewer preference votes than a number of other candidates who themselves, nevertheless had preferences from fewer than 10 percent of their party's voters).

Since 2001, lists of this "most open" type have also been used in the elections to fill the 96 proportional seats in the 242-member upper house of Japan.

Countries using open-list proportional representation as of 2020.
Countries where all parties use an open list
Countries where most parties use an open list
Varies by state
Finnish parliamentary election uses the open list method. Here an official poster rack in central Helsinki displays the candidates and their assigned ballot numbers by party.
Ballot during the Finnish parliamentary election of 2011
A campaign bus in Tokyo for (successful) Communist proportional candidate Tomoko Tamura in Japan's 2016 Councillors election . Tamura received roughly half of her votes in Tokyo, other proportional candidates on the same list won most of their votes in other prefectures. [ 10 ] The proportional district is nationwide; but limited by a very short legal campaign period, some proportional candidates focus their campaign efforts on only certain regions where they personally or their party have a local base.