How much is your vote worth?: This is how the D'Hondt Law decides the elections

In just two weeks, and almost two months after the regional and municipal elections, Spain returns to the polls. This time, it is the general elections that summon 37,466,432 voters, of which 2,325,310 reside abroad. The deputies that come out of these elections will be chosen by the citizens of the seventeen autonomies and the two autonomous cities.

The Spanish electoral system, despite being proportional, generates controversies around the D'Hont law, which is the one that regulates the distribution of votes.

Through this process, the seats are distributed in two ways: assigning two per province in an equal manner and adding their votes to distribute them among the parties. In this way, 102 of the deputies fall on all constituencies regardless of their registered population, favoring the political representation of all territories. Meanwhile, the remaining 248 are distributed according to the number of votes obtained and the population of each territory.

The discrepancies with this system are given by that distribution already assigned that all the electoral districts receive except those of Ceuta and Melilla, to which one seat is assigned to each one.

"Voting in areas of the so-called 'emptied Spain' is better than voting in big cities" or "the vote of the cities is worth less than that of the towns" are sentences that are repeated every time a general election approaches. What are these claims for?

Soria is the Spanish province with the smallest number of inhabitants, although like all the others it has two seats, the only ones that will represent its territory in the Congress of Deputies. On the contrary, Barcelona and Madrid, in addition to the two regulatory seats, have 30 and 35 more, respectively, due to the population concentration of their provinces.

In this sense, Madrid would have a small number of parliamentarians, taking into account that said autonomy has almost 75 times more population than the Castilian-Leonese province.

This process used to distribute the seats between the candidacies in a proportional way to the number of votes obtained owes its name to Victor D'Hondt, a Belgian lawyer who devised the system in the 19th century. The method was adopted by countries such as Portugal, Finland and France, and one of the consequences of its application is that the parties with great strength in certain territories, such as the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties, would obtain a significant number of deputies with respect to those with a national presence who distribute their votes among different territories.

One of the criticisms attributed to it is that it is a method designed for bipartisan political systems since, faced with various options, it would tend to favor the historical parties because, in those places where few seats are distributed, these tend to go to the majority parties.

For example, a province with eight seats like La Coruña has to distribute them among four parties that are running for election. Once the polling stations are closed, the results are ordered from highest to lowest and the percentage of votes obtained by each party with respect to the total number of valid ballots is calculated.

To avoid excessive fragmentation of the parliamentary institution, in the general elections those options that have not reached 3% of the votes are discarded.

Next, a table of eight columns is made that correspond to each of the seats to be distributed in La Coruña and completed with the number of votes for each candidacy divided by 1,2,3... until it is complete.

Deputies are assigned to the 8 highest results in descending order and, in the event of a tie between parties, the seat would go to the party with the highest number of total votes.

Thus, in the constituency of La Coruña, party "A" would get four deputies in the general elections, party "B" three deputies and party "C" one deputy. This same formula would be repeated for each of the Spanish provinces.