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The distinguishing feature of plurality-majority systems is that they almost always use single-member districts. In a First Past the Post system, sometimes known as a plurality single-member district system, the winner is the candidate with the most votes, but not necessarily an absolute majority of the votes (see First Past the Post (FPTP)). When this system is used in multi-member districts it becomes the Block Vote (see Block Vote). Voters have as many votes as there are seats to be filled, and the highest-polling candidates fill the positions, regardless of the percentage of the vote they actually achieve. Majoritarian systems, such as the Australian Alternative Vote (see Alternative Vote) and the French Two-Round System (see Two-Round System), try to ensure that the winning candidate receives an absolute majority (i.e. over fifty percent). Each system, in essence, makes use of voters' second preferences to produce a majority winner, if one does not emerge from the first round of voting.
Reproduced by permission of International IDEA from Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook © 2005 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance The electronic version of this publication is made available under a Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the publication, and to remix and adapt it, provided it is only for non-commercial purposes, that you appropriately attribute the publication and that you distribute it under an identical license. For more information on this licence see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 .
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Reproduced by permission of International IDEA from Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook © 2005 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance The electronic version of this publication is made available under a Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the publication, and to remix and adapt it, provided it is only for non-commercial purposes, that you appropriately attribute the publication and that you distribute it under an identical license. For more information on this licence see: