The Turkish election in June 2015 was remarkable for many reasons. In this short piece, FairVote's Robert Buderi explores the ins and outs of the 2015 campaign and the operation of Turkey's party list proportional system. Buderi shows that a high national threshold in a proportional representation system tends to undermine the proportionality of election results and introduce some of the problems rife in winner-take-all plurality systems like the US and Britain. 

Brazilians flocked to the polls on October 5, 2014, to vote for their next president. Yet, after all the votes were counted, no one was elected. This blog entry briefly explores the use of runoff elections in Brazil before discussing the growing worldwide movement to repeat Brazil's enfranchisement of  16 and 17 year olds.

At the end of an unusual election campaign, New Zealand's Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) electoral system has delivered Kiwis a strong mandate for the current government, with the first time a single party has  won a majority of seats  since the nation replaced  U.S.-style plurality voting elections with MMP in 1993. The election also demonstrated many of the advantages that such fair representation voting systems have over the single-member plurality systems so often used in American elections. 

Hot on the heels of electoral reforms last year, small Caribbean island nation Trinidad and Tobago has abandoned plurality voting in favor of runoff voting in its national elections. FairVote is keeping close watch on Trinidad and Tobago, as political parties, legislators and citizens continue to discuss voting systems, including ranked choice voting and fair representation voting, and agitate for reform.

Having tentatively thrust off their military dictatorship, Myanmar actively debates adopting Proportional Representation for its legislature. (Photo Credit: Htoo Tay Zar, Wikicommons)

While the FIFA World Cup will decide the best soccer team in the world, the World Cup of Democracy will decide the best democracy in the world. See how the tournament played out after the jump.

Australia's Senate is elected by a method of ranked choice voting that forces voters to rank every candidate on the ballot. But after a variety of quirky minor parties have made their way into the Senate, it might be time to allow voters the freedom to not rank all candidates.

In India's election of the 16th Lok Sabha, the BJP appeared to win a landslide victory, winning a majority of seats. In reality, India's winner-take-all system generated significant disproportionality, artificially inflating BJP's mandate.