ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

SOME ASPECTS REGARDING THE “UNINOMINAL VOTE”MIHAI GHIŢULESCU, COSMIN LUCIAN GHERGHEThe idea of changing the Romanian electoral system is not new – it goesback several years – but the debate really started when the President declaredhimself a resolute supporter and expressed his intention to organize areferendum in this matter.The polls show that the most Romanian people agree with the change, but,if we will make a step forward, we will see that nobody – neither ordinary people,nor political class – really knows how this must happen. The whole debate goesaround two magic words: “uninominal vote”, without asking what these mean.We intend to discuss here some of the main characteristics, advantagesand disadvantages of this electoral system and, finally, its possible consequenceson the Romanian political system.“Single-member districts” and “Plurality/Majority Systems”First of all, the “uninominal vote” (this formula is used very rarely inEnglish) is based on the division of the country into a certain number of “singlememberdistricts” (generally, equal to the total number of parliamentary seats 1 ).The “uninominal vote” is not opposed to the PR system, as we may deduce fromthe Romanian debate, but to the “plurinominal vote” (with multi-memberelectoral districts). This frequent confusion comes from the fact that theplurality/majority systems (opposed to the PR systems) are generally, but notalways 2 , associated to the single-member district and that this one is always acomponent of a majority/plurality system.That is why we must discuss the two cases of majoritarian system withsingle-member district: the FPTP System and the Two-Round (Runoff) System 3 .1 The mixed or parallel systems represent the exceptions.2 There are two exceptions: the Block Vote (when voters has the right to a number ofvotes equal to the number of seats to be filled and the first candidates win the seats regardless totheir percentage of votes) and the Party Vote Block (when a person may vote only for a party list,without choosing between candidates, and the list with the most votes win all the seats to be filledin that district regardless to its percentage). As we can see, these are also plurality/majoritysystems, but they use multi-member districts.3 We may also include in the same category the Alternative Vote (Instant-runoff voting)(when the voters rank their options an and the candidate who receives the majority of first preferencesget the seat; if nobody has a majority, the last candidates are excluded one by one and their votes aretransferred to those with the second preference until somebody gets the majority). We will not discussthis system because it is used only in Australia, Fiji (for the Parliament), Ireland (for the President)and in some US counties (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Vote).ARHIVELE OLTENIEI, Serie nouă, nr. 21, 2007, p. 309–312