Paragraph 19

 

From a political perspective, 33 party lists were present in the multi-mandate (national) constituency in the last Ukrainian general elections (held 31 March 2002) despite the difficulties in presenting lists[5].  Only 6 of them got more than the 4%, allowing them to participate in the national distribution of seats.  With respect to those lists under the 4% threshold: one had more than 3% (836,000 votes), two exceeded 2% (between 525,000 and 550,000 votes), and 4 more with more than 1% (from 282,000 to 362,000 votes).  Twenty other lists remained under the 1% of the votes, even though two had more than 200,000 voters, three more than 100,000, with 15 getting less than 100,000 ballots).  Therefore, the proportionally elected part of the Chamber reduced political fragmentation, although at a relatively high cost in terms of “useless” votes (nearly 4,700,000 votes cast for those parties under the 4% threshold, i.e. almost 20% of the votes did not serve to elect a member of parliament).