Walter Banks wrote:

> What democratic countries other than the UK, US and Canada can
> representatives get elected with less than a majority of the votes cast?

This question seems to be imprecise. 

The first thing is what you mean with "elected with less than a majority of
votes cast". There are many elections with more than two choices (an almost
foreign concept to most US voters, it seems :)  Some of them require a
second turn in case none of the candidates got what's called "absolute
majority", with only two candidates, thus guaranteeing that the winner will
have absolute majority. Others don't require absolute majority, and whoever
has the most votes (without having a majority of votes cast) wins the
election. That's a quite common scenario, and many elections outside the
USA result in a winner with less than a majority of the cast votes. This
doesn't seem to be too common in the USA, though, due to the fact that in
most public elections above the local level there are only two candidates.

Then there's the question which election you're talking about in the USA.
If you mean the presidential election: the president of the USA of course
does get elected with the majority of the votes cast -- the votes of the
electoral college, of course, and not of the so-called "public vote", which
is never really a vote for a president, but rather for a party and its
electoral college members.

If you talk about this difference between the "public vote" and the
electoral college, this is pretty much the same in any parliamentary
system. In a parliamentary system, the leader of the executive branch
(usually called "prime minister" or something the like) is elected by the
parliament. The members of the parliament are usually not required to vote
on any particular candidate, even though they may feel compelled to vote
for the one their party advertised during the campaign. (Very similar to
the electoral college members.) So the elected leader may be someone who
wouldn't have a majority of a "popular vote". Also, often the parliamentary
majority is not a single party but rather a coalition, because no party
reached absolute majority. In such a case, even when they elect the
advertised leader of the biggest coalition party, she doesn't have a
majority of the public vote.


To venture a guess, I think that there are more elections outside the USA
with a winner that has less than a majority of the cast votes than there
are in the USA. Seems to be pretty rare in the USA.

Gerhard
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