Welsh Senedd Election - PR in action. This will be interesting!

It seems to be a very complicated system and ends up with a result which voters might not expect or like.

My first reaction to the polls was unprintable.

Well thanks for yelling us what they were doing.
I do think it's probably better than "first past the post".

NotSpaghetti

Thanks for the link.
I think they've probably chosen this "closed link"over (say) the "single transferable vote" for ease of administration and to make sure they have the diversity they (probably) want.

It will be interesting to see how it goes.
I wonder if the electorate will feel slightly more "removed" from politics?

I think this method of seat allocation is building on the previous regional voting system. The regions have been changed somewhat, so that there is a broadly equal number of voters per region. That also changes the voter profiles.

I don’t think it is possible to say that it is an unfair system in terms of views being represented in Senedd across the political spectrum, but I completely agree that it removes the locality perspective, which I am personally concerned about. I have always had reservations about PR for that reason.

It was a mixture of D’Hondt and FPTP previously. Here is the explanation from the government.

‘In elections for the Senedd, using the additional member system, each voter has two votes. The first vote is for a member for the voter's constituency, elected by the first past the post system. The second vote is for a regional closed party list of candidates. Additional member seats are allocated from the lists by the D'Hondt method, with constituency results being taken into account in the allocation.’

Just been looking at this again - wasn't the earlier method based on D’Hondt too?

Thanks for the link.
I think they've probably chosen this "closed link"over (say) the "single transferable vote" for ease of administration and to make sure they have the diversity they (probably) want.

It will be interesting to see how it goes.
I wonder if the electorate will feel slightly more "removed" from politics?

It’s D’Hondt, this is the first time it will be used.
senedd.wales/senedd-now/senedd-blog/senedd-election-2026-what-is-the-d-hondt-formula-and-how-does-it-work/

What type of PR is it please?