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The Limited Vote (LV) is one of the rarer systems in use today, but it has some advocates due to the way in which it facilitates the election of strong minority candidates and allows for a 'personal' vote for individual candidates. In essence, LV falls between SNTV and the Block Vote, as there are multi-member districts, and winning candidates are simply those who poll most votes. Voters have fewer votes than there are seats to be filled, but more than one vote.
In practice this system is only used in Gibraltar, for lower house elections, in Spain for the upper house of the Spanish Cortes, and in local government elections, primarily in the United States. The LV most often gives voters one fewer vote than there are seats to be filled, as is the case in Spain, and as was the case in the United Kingdom between 1867 and 1885.
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: