Elections are all well and good, but they may mean little to people if it is difficult to vote or if, at the end of the day, their vote makes no difference to the way the nation is governed. The 'ease of voting' is determined by such factors as how complex the ballot paper is, see Vote Counting, how easy it is for the voter to get to a polling place, see Voting Sites, how up to date the electoral roll is, see Voter Registration, and how confident the voter will be that his or her ballot is secret.
Coupled with those concerns is the broader issue of whether an individual's vote makes a difference to the final results. If you know that your preferred candidate has no chance of winning a seat in your particular district, what is the incentive to vote? In some electoral systems the number of 'wasted votes' i.e., those which do not go towards the election of any candidate, as distinct from spoiled or invalid votes, which are ballots excluded from the count, can amount to a substantial proportion of the total national vote.
The meaningfulness of elections is determined by how powerful the elected parliament actually is. Hollow or choiceless elections in authoritarian systems, where parliaments have little real influence on the formation of governments or on government policy, are far less important than elections that constitute parliaments, which actually have the power to determine central elements in people's everyday lives. But even within democratic parliamentary systems, the choice of electoral system can influence the legitimacy of institutions. For example, the Australian Senate between 1919 and 1946 was elected by a highly disproportional electoral system, the Alternative Vote in multi-member districts, which produced lop-sided and unrepresentative results. This tended to undermine the actual legitimacy of the Senate itself in the eyes of both electors and politicians and, some observers argued, also undermined public support for the institutions of federal government in general. After the system was altered to a fairer proportional system, the Single Transferable Vote, in 1948, the Senate began to be perceived as more credible and representative, and thus respect for it and its relative importance in decision-making increased, see The Alternative Vote in Australia.
