Limited Vote

The Limited Vote is a form of First Past the Post with more than one winner.

Limited Vote

Voters have more than one vote, but less votes than the number of seats to be filled. When setting up the electoral system, the designers would decide how many representatives each area would get and how many votes each person would have.

In Gibraltar, each voter has 10 votes and each area elects 17 representatives.

The limited vote was used to elect MPs for several large cities in the UK between 1867 and 1885. Each voter had two votes and each constituency elected three representatives.

The Japanese Lower House used a variant of the Limited Vote called the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) between 1948 and 1993. Each voters cast just one vote in constituencies that varied in the amount of representatives they elected.

How to Vote

Each party puts up more than one candidate. On polling day the voter puts as many Xs as they are allowed next to the names of the candidates they want to elect.

Effects and impact of the limited vote

The limited vote is supposed to ensure the same party can’t win all the positions available  as voters have fewer votes than positions available, but this can be circumvented with sufficient organisation.

The more votes an elector has, the more disproportional the result will be and the harder it is for smaller parties or minority candidates to gain representation.

The fewer votes each elector has, the more complicated it gets as candidates from the same party compete against each other to get elected. Putting up too many candidates can result in votes being spread too thinly, but putting up too few can result in surplus votes going to waste. Parties have to educate their voters into spreading their votes equally across all their candidates.