Choice Voting Blog

The New York Times has a nice graphic illustrating proportional representation in today's online and tomorrow's print edition. On January 30, Iraq will use PR to elect 275 legislators. Voters vote for a party, and each party wins a fraction of seats equal to its percentage of the vote. So a candidate or party needs only .4% of the vote to win representation.

The election is also structured to guarantee that at least 25% of the representatives will be women. In the United States in 2004, women made up only 14% of the House and 14% of the Senate. See Rutgers's Center for American Women and Politics for more statistics.