Sunday, February 05, 2006

In the first comment in Augean Stables, it is pointed out that Hamas did not get a majority of votes in the Palestinian election. Representatives were apparently elected out of single member districts and perhaps needed a plurality of votes. The comment author suggests that proportional representation would have been a better system. I think, as in primaries here, runoffs would be better.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Run off elections give people a chance to cast a negative opinion in a sense. I think it was recently in Nigeria that the first woman was elected president of an African country. She was second in the initial balloting. There were a number of candidates, the leading one of which got some 30% of the vote. Evidently asked to choose between him and the lady who ran behaind him, the majority preferred to have her, which I think is important information. Heh, thanks for the comment though.