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Under the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV), each elector has one vote, but there are multiple seats in each district to be filled. Those candidates with the highest vote totals fill these positions. This means that in, for example, a four-member district, one would need just over twenty percent of the vote to ensure election. Conversely, a large party with seventy-five percent of the vote spread equally among three candidates is likely to take three of the four seats. As of 1997, SNTV is used for parliamentary elections in Jordan (see Jordan - Electoral System Design in the Arab World) and Vanuatu, and for 125 out of 161 seats in the Taiwanese parliament. However, its most well known application was for Japanese lower house elections from 1948 to 1993.
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: