Electoral Law for the Hamburg district elections

Welcome to the Electoral Law application. This application allows you to view stored elections and their results in Hamburg. Furthermore, you can play around in a what-if mode to see how vote changes affect the result.

What are district elections?

Every five years, EU citizens in Hamburg can vote in the district election, parallel to the election of the European parliament. Hamburg has seven districts and each has an elected district assembly that is elected in these district elections. All citizens of the European Union, who have their permanent residence in one of the districts and are 16 years and older, can vote in the elections.

How do you vote?

Every voter has a total of 10 votes. These are split between five votes in the constituency of the voter and five votes for the entire district. For the constituency vote, the five votes can be allocated to a single candidate or spread between multiple candidates. The overall district votes can be given to one candidate or one party or spread between candidates and/or parties. This type of vote allocation leads to unpredictable allocation of the seats of one party to its candidates; after all, the vote count of each candidate matters.

How are the winners calculated?

This is the tricky part. Roughly, the calculation follows this order: (1) filter out parties that did not pass the voting threshold of 3%, (2) calculate the number of seats of remaining parties, (3) calculate elected candidates in constituencies, (4) calculate elected candidates district-wide. The purpose of this application is to help you understand this calculation.