2026 Welsh Senedd - All parties with more than 1 percent of the vote got at least one seat

2026 May 7 - Welsh Senedd election

All 96 members elected through closed-list party-list PR (using the D'Hondt method) in 16 6-seat districts.

The 16 districts were created by pairing the 32 Westminster ridings in Wales, thus no gerrymandering.

Voters cannot vote for individual candidates, but the names on each party's list were shown on the ballot so voters could see who the parties' candidates were.

1.2M votes cast (says Wiki "2026 Sened election")

approx. 75,000 in each district

Droop quota approx 10,700 in each

if pure PR nation-wide had been used, the effective threshold would have been 12,500

(about 1 percent of total votes cast), which is more than the 10,700 required under district list PR.

so actually lower than the pure list PR effective threshold!

Droop being less than Hare overall is normal. Droop uses seat count plus 1 in a district, while effective threshold is votes/seats.

This mathematically means the number of votes in Droop quota is lower than effective threshold overall, so that can be expected.

and is proven whenever math is done right (argh)

(the use of Droop overall is immaterial -- the difference between 1/96th and 1/97th plus 1 is not much at all.)

just like when Thomas Hare's original concept of STV was to use Hare quota and all of UK as one district,

 so using Hare quota versus Droop quota was no difference at all 

-- 1/435th versus 1/436th plus 1 is hardly any difference at all.

(436 is picked out of hat but is about the number of seats his nation-wide district would have had)

A party which has its support evenly spread around the country would not have been guaranteed representation in Wales even if pure PR had been used. The party would only have taken a seat if it had at least one percent of the vote overall, as that was the effective threshold.

It sounds easy for a party to take one percent of the votes, but due to wide-open Welsh political climate, no less than ten parties got less than one percent of the vote.

This includes the "Official Monster Raving Loony party".

Even with district contests determining the results of the 2026 election (as opposed to pure PR), every party that got more than 1 percent of the nation-wide vote got one or more seats. This is true because those parties each got at least 4 percent of the vote, (no parties got between 1 and 4 percent), and obviously 14 percent in a district or something close enough to it to win a seat anyway.

so the use of 16 6-seat districts were not a hindrance to elected representation any more than the total 96-seat count was.

but yes without district and without  an electoral threshold, GI would have been lower, as the medium-popular parties would have taken more seats, All were under -represented proportionally in the 2026 election.

and yes perhaps some of the dis-proportionality came from different numbers of votes cast in different districts (so the district quotas varied)

haven't looked at at that...

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(I sort of confused STV in districts with list PR in districts, and compared them to pure PR in one Wales-wide district.  but still maybe the analysis shows how a system with districts and fair voting was just as effective as pure PR would have been, at least in this case.)

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