However, the term is vague and ill-defined, having been used to refer to a wide variety of unrelated concepts and metrics.
Comparing wasted votes between parties in legislatures determines the efficiency gap measure, which quantifies the bias in allocating voter preferences at the level of electoral districts.
In list PR systems, this relationship is established based on party votes.
Wasted votes in proportional representation increase with a higher electoral threshold.
Decreasing district magnitude (electing fewer members in the contest) is one of the ways to reduce political fragmentation in the chamber.
On occasion, lost votes in proportional representation (arising from high electoral threshold) result in a party winning an outright majority of seats without winning an outright majority of votes.
The goal of ranked voting is to reduce the waste that occurs in many elections due to votes being cast for unsuccessful candidates or by the existence of winners' excessive leads over their nearest contenders.
[example needed] An electoral system which reduces the number of wasted votes can be considered desirable on grounds of fairness or because of the danger that voters who feel their votes make no difference may feel detached from their government and the democratic process.
Multi-seat constituencies reduce the number of wasted votes as long as proportional representation is used.
(When used with winner-take-all systems, multi-member constituencies may still see the wasted vote exceed 50 percent.
Nineteen of the parties that did not exceed the electoral threshold did win district seats so did have some representation.
In 1998, the Russian Constitutional Court found the threshold legal, taking into account limits in its use.
[15] In the 2002 Turkish general election, as many as 46.33 percent (14,545,438) of votes were cast for parties that went unrepresented in the parliament.
[16] An unusually large electoral threshold of 10 percent prevented all but two parties from taking seats.
The justification for such a high threshold was to prevent multi-party coalitions and put a stop to the fragmentation of political parties seen in the 1960s and 1970s.
[citation needed] However, coalitions ruled between 1991 and 2002, but mainstream parties continued to be fragmented; in the 2002 elections, as much as 45 percent of votes were cast for parties which failed to reach the threshold and were thus unrepresented in the parliament.
In Bulgaria, 24 percent of voters cast their ballots for parties that would not gain representation in the elections of 1991 and 2013.
[19] In the 2015 Danish general election, where MMP was used, the wasted vote calculated by the formula above in Denmark proper was 0.92 percent.
In the 2020 Slovak parliamentary election, 28.39 percent of all valid votes did not gain representation.
[23] In the 2022 Slovenian parliamentary election, 24 percent of the vote went to parties that did not reach the electoral threshold.
In the German federal state of Saarland 2022 election, the total wasted vote was 22.3 percent.
[clarification needed] For proportional representation, the German Federal Constitutional Court rejected in 2011 and in 2014 an electoral threshold for the European Parliament that led to wasted votes based on the principle of one person, one vote.
It was justified in the case of Turkey in order to stabilize the volatile political situation over recent decades.