Party Block Vote (PBV)

Under Party Block Vote, unlike FPTP, there are multi-member districts. Voters have a single vote, and choose between party lists of candidates rather than between individuals. The party which wins most votes takes all the seats in the district, and its entire list of candidates is duly elected. As in FPTP, there is no requirement for the winner to have an absolute majority of the votes. As of 2004, PBV was used as the only system or the major component of the system in four countries—Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti and Singapore.

Advantages and disadvantages of PBV

Advantages of PBV

PBV is simple to use, encourages strong parties and allows for parties to put up mixed slates of candidates in order to facilitate minority representation. It can be used to help to ensure balanced ethnic representation, as it enables parties to present ethnically diverse lists of candidates for election—and may indeed be designed to require them to do so.

Disadvantages of PBV

However, the Party Block Vote also suffers from most of the disadvantages of FPTP, and may indeed produce highly disproportional results where one party wins almost all of the seats with a simple majority of the votes. In Djibouti’s 1997 election, the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority coalition won every seat, leaving the two opposition parties without any representation in the legislature.