Majority electoral systems.
The majority electoral system is based on a system of personal representation in power. A specific person is always nominated as a candidate for an elected office in the majority system.
The mechanism for nominating candidates may vary: in some countries, self-nomination is permitted along with the nomination of candidates from political parties or public associations, in others, candidates may be nominated only by political parties. In any case, however, in a majoritarian constituency, candidates are nominated on a personal basis. Accordingly, a voter here votes for an individual candidate who is an independent subject of the electoral process - a citizen exercising his or her passive suffrage. Another matter is that this particular candidate may be supported by a political party. However, formally a citizen is elected not from a party, but "in itself".
As a rule, in most cases, elections under the majority system are held in single-mandate constituencies. The number of constituencies then corresponds to the number of mandates. The winner in each constituency is the candidate who received the majority of the votes of the constituency's voters as stipulated by law. The majority varies from country to country: absolute, where a candidate must obtain more than 50 per cent of the votes to be eligible for a mandate; relative, where the winner is the candidate who received more votes than all other candidates (provided that all candidates have less votes than the winning candidate); and qualified, where a candidate must obtain more than 2/3, 75 per cent or 3/4 of the votes to win an election. The majority of votes may also be calculated differently, either from the total number of voters in the district or, more often, from the number of voters who came to the election and voted. The absolute majority system provides for two rounds of voting if no candidate has obtained the required majority in the first round. Candidates who obtained a relative majority of votes in the first round participate in the second round. Such a system is costly from the financial point of view, but is used in presidential elections in most countries of the world, including Russia.
The winning candidates are similarly determined in multi-mandate majoritarian constituencies with categorical voting. The only fundamental difference is that the voter has as many votes as the mandates "played" in the district. Each vote can only be cast for one of the candidates.
Thus, the majority electoral system is a system of formation of elected bodies of power on the basis of personal (individual) representation, in which a candidate who has obtained the majority of votes provided for by law is considered elected.
The majority electoral system is the only possible way to elect heads of state or state entities (for example, federal subjects). It also applies to elections to collegial bodies of power (legislative assemblies). However, the effectiveness of this electoral system for the formation of parliament in terms of the adequacy of political representation in it is rightly questioned. For all its merits (and this includes the existence of direct links between a candidate/parliamentary deputy and the electorate, the possibility of priority representation in the parliament of the largest political parties/forces creating stable single-party governments, and, as a consequence, the absence of political fragmentation in the representative bodies of power, etc.), the majority system has an obvious and very significant disadvantage. Under such a system, "the winner gets everything". Citizens who voted for other candidates are not represented in the legislative bodies at all. This is unfair, especially since under a system of relative majority, as a rule, it is the majority that is not represented in the parliament. For example, if there are eight candidates in a majoritarian constituency, the distribution of votes was as follows: seven candidates received approximately equal votes (each of them received 12% of the votes - a total of 84%), the eighth candidate received 13%, and 3% voted against all candidates. The eighth candidate will receive a mandate and actually represent only 13% of the electorate. 87%(!) of voters voted against the candidate (or at least not for him) and he will be considered democratically elected.
Continuation in the next part.