#IMadeMyMark: Understanding the impact of your vote on Parliament

South Africa’s Parliament consists of 490 seats. Our ‘bicameral’ Parliament has two houses – a lower house and an upper house.

The lower house, or the National Assembly, represents 400 seats. The upper house, or the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), represents 90 seats (10 members from each province).

Members to the NCOP are provincial delegates nominated by each provincial legislature. The National Assembly, however, is filled in accordance with the votes cast in the general election by the electorate.

The South African electoral system is a closed-list proportional representation system, and a general election is held every five years. The process is facilitated by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), which is responsible for ensuring free and fair elections.

At the general election, voters elect the national and provincial legislatures simultaneously. Voters are presented with two separate ballots – a national ballot and a provincial ballot. These ballots list, respectively, all the political parties competing in the election at the national and provincial level.

Voters cast one (categorical) vote for the party of their choice on each ballot, as they see fit.

In this system, voters vote for parties – not for individuals. It is the parties’ prerogative who it wants in the legislatures. Parties submit to the IEC nine provincial lists for the provincial legislatures and, for the national legislature, nine provincial-to-national (or‘regional’) lists and one national list (although a national list is not mandatory).

These lists are ‘closed’ and cannot be altered by voters (but are publicised widely for the voter to consider).

At the end of the electoral process, these (ranked) lists are used to fill the seats allocated to each party. The higher up on a list a party member is, the more likely that member is to get a seat.

The National Assembly is the decisive house in Parliament and it is here where the executive cabinet originates.

For seats to the National Assembly, only the national ballot is relevant. The National Assembly seats are filled in two tiers: Half (200) seats are regional seats and filled by reference to regional votes and regional lists; the other half (200) are national seats and filled by reference to national votes and national lists (or entirely from regional lists if a party did not submit a separate national list).

But first votes must be converted into seats.

In order to allocate seats, the number of votes a party received is translated into a proportion of the seats in the National Assembly, first regionally and then nationally.

First, the number of votes equivalent to a single seat must be calculated. Each seat then represents a ‘quota’ of votes. The simplest way to do this is by dividing the total number of votes by the total number of seats. In South Africa, we use a version of the Droop Quota method.

For regional seats, the quota is determined, for each region, by the total number of votes in that region and the total number of seats in that region.

For the national seats, the quota is determined by the total number of votes in the country and the total number of national seats.

Seats are allocated proportionally – the number of seats allocated to a party depends on how many times the party meets a full quota. This is calculated by dividing each party’s share of the vote, regionally and then nationally, by the quotas determined at those levels.

During this process, the remainders are set aside. If, after this process, there are unallocated seats, the remaining seats are allocated to the parties who have the largest remainder. And so the 400 seats for the National Assembly are filled.