Home > 1.3.2 Freedom of voters to express their wishes > UKRAINE - Joint Opinion on the Draft Law No. 3366 about Elections to the Parliament
 
 
 
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Paragraph 21
 

Article 84 regulates the counting of ballots. For territorial election districts in Ukraine, votes are counted for candidates, while in the foreign election district the votes are counted for the political parties. Allocation of mandates is addressed by Articles 91, 92, and 94. A legal threshold of two percent (2%) is established by Article 94.3: “The entitlement to the participation in the distribution of the deputy mandates shall be acquired by the parliamentary candidates entered in the election list of the parties in the territorial election districts and in the national election district, provided that no less than two per cent of the votes of all the voters, who took part in the voting within the national election district, have been cast for the parliamentary candidates from this party within the national election district.” The minimum threshold is known in many European electoral regimes and their purpose is systematically to avoid an excessive fragmentation of parliaments. Combined with preferential voting, it may create the possibility for a candidate to reach the electoral quota within a territorial election district, thereby winning a mandate in the candidate’s own right, but not be allocated a mandate if the candidate’s political party did not reach the two percent (2%) threshold nationally. This limitation does, however, not contradict European standards.