Details
Each of the 26 cantons is a constituency. The number of deputies of each constituency depends on the population of the canton, but a canton must have at least one deputy. Each voter gets to elect the deputies of the canton he or she lives in and thus, each voter has as many votes as there are deputies to elect. A voter cannot give more than two votes to the same person. Note that a voter can vote for persons of different parties making it impossible to count the number of votes a party has received at the national level. To determine a party's strength the notion of "fictional voter" has to be introduced and is defined by the Swiss Federal Statistical Institute as such: number of votes obtain by party A * number of valid ballot / number of valid votes. Even if the ballot is valid, a voter can decide not to use all of the ballot's votes resulting in invalid or blank votes. Also note that number of valid votes / number of valid ballot closely match the number of deputies a canton needs to elect. Actually, this number represent the average number of valid votes a voter has used. The formula can then be summed up by: number of votes obtain by party A / average of valid votes per voters. The result will give you the number of fictional voter for a given party in a given canton. A total number of fictional voter can then be established and the party strength can be deduced. However, the notion of fictional voters is not used to determine the number of deputies a party can have nor the election's turnout. The number of deputies a party can have is determined at the cantonal level using the proportional representation with the Hagenbach-Bischoff system (except in cantons with only one deputy to elect). The election's turnout is computed in the following way: number of valid ballot casted / number of registered voters.
Read more about this topic: National Council (Switzerland)
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)