As in legislative elections, one way to avoid candidates being elected with only a small proportion of the popular vote is to hold a second ballot if no one candidate wins an absolute majority on the first round. This can either be between the top two candidates (majority run-off) or between more than two candidates (majority-plurality). France, most Latin American countries, all the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics, and many countries in francophone Africa use TRS to elect their presidents. Elsewhere in Africa, the system is used by Angola, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Principe, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe; in Europe, apart from France, it is used by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; and it is found in Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Timor-Leste, and Yemen.
There are a number of adaptations to straight majority run-off and majority-plurality rules. In Costa Rica, a candidate can win on the first round with only 40 per cent of the vote; conversely, in Sierra Leone, a second round is only avoided if one candidate gets 55 per cent in the first. In Argentina, a successful candidate must poll 45 per cent, or 40 per cent plus a lead of more than 10 per cent over the second-placed candidate. A similar 40 per cent threshold with a 10 per cent margin exists in Ecuador.
A number of countries also have minimum turnout rates for their presidential elections, typically 50 per cent, as is the case in many of the former Soviet republics; this is an additional mechanism for ensuring the legitimacy of the result but has substantial cost and logistical implications if the minimum turnout is not met and the election has to be re-run.
Apart from those countries where parties could create winning pre-election alliances so that presidential candidates could be elected in the first round (e.g. in Brazil in 1994 and Chile in 1989 and 1994), the experience of TRS has appeared problematic in Latin America. For example, in the 1990 elections in Peru, Alberto Fujimori obtained 56 per cent of the votes in the second round, but his party won only 14 of 60 seats in the Senate and 33 seats of 180 in the Chamber of Deputies. In Brazil in 1989, Fernando Collor de Mello was elected in the second round with just under half of the votes, but his party won, in non-concurrent legislative elections, only three of the 75 Senate seats and only 40 of 503 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The problems of governance which have resulted demonstrate the importance of considering interlinked institutional provisions together. Although TRS produced presidents who had the second-round support of a majority of the electorate, it existed alongside systems for election to the legislature which did not guarantee those presidents significant legislative support.
While the successful candidates gathered the support of other parties between the first and second rounds, there was little to enable them to keep that support in place after the elections.
