Hong Kong's pro-democracy parties did not perform as well as expected in the September 9 Legislative Council elections. The New York Times would have you believe that the disappointing result can be blamed on Hong Kong's proportional representation system. But that explanation is misleading and distracts from the real problems of the city's electoral structure.

A lordship, by its very definition, has historically not been an elected office. But there is a strong movement in the British House of Commons to transform the upper house of the British parliament, the House of Lords, into a largely elected body based on proportional representation. This reform is long overdue. 

On July 7, Libya will hold its first democratic elections since 1964. FairVote explains Libya's hybrid election system for the 200-seat General National Congress and how it could be better if all seats were elected by a form of proportional representation.

With Mexican voters set to go to the polls on July 1, the country's three-party system combined with its winner-take-all presidential elections create a recipe for popular discontent with no end in sight.

On June 14, Egypt's high court disbanded the nation's parliament elected last winter, arguing that the candidates should have run without party affiliation. The ruling makes this weekend's presidential election all the more important, as the president will become the only national government leader who has been elected and will not have a parliament to check his decisions. This blog post analysis thus takes on even greater importance.

In the aftermath of a military "coup" staged on June 18, the future of Egyptian democracy looks precarious. In retrospect, the situation might have been prevented if Egypt had used proportional representation to elect its parliament in the first place. 

The French presidential election of 2012 is the 10th presidential election in the 5th Republic and the 9th election by direct universal suffrage. The winner will serve a term of five years. The first round was held on April 22 and the runoff will take place on Sunday, May 6.

France elected a new president on May 6 in a majority runoff in which Francois Hollande defeated incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy. FairVote's director and FairVote intern Huseyin Koyuncu, a French student from Sciences Po, report on the election and five notable facts about how France votes.

After a disputed election in 2007 caused violence and chaos across Kenya, the youth are organizing to ensure a different outcome when Kenyans return to the polls in 2013 to elect a new president.

After previously explaining the hybrid election system recently used by Egypt in its parliamentary elections, we here analyze how use of winner-take-all elections for many seats distorted fair representation of political views and women. Seats elected by proportional representation provided far more representative results.