Elections to the Parliament of Lower Saxony

Every parliamentary election is the expression of the democratic principle of the sovereignty of the people, according to which all state authority proceeds from the people and is exercised by the people through elections and referendums. On the one hand, the election determines the actual make-up and thus the majorities and minorities in parliament, so that parliament reflects society's interests and opinions; on the other hand, by the act of voting the citizens transfer the state authority emanating from them to their parliamentary representatives for a limited time. Elections thus offer the best imaginable protection against uncontrolled exercise of power and arbitrary use of power by minorities or masses. In precisely this respect, elections are the main instrument of democratic control.

Elections give citizens an opportunity to consider how effective "their" representatives are - in other words, to specifically "take stock" politically in terms of their work and performance and to exercise influence over the balance of power in parliament at regular intervals.

The legal bases of elections to the Parliament of Lower Saxony are established in the constitution of Lower Saxony and in the state elections law. These provide for the members of the State Parliament to be elected in a general, direct, free, equal and secret ballot. All Germans who have reached the age of 18 and live in the state of Lower Saxony are eligible to vote. Nominations winning under 5% of the votes do not receive a mandate.

The members of the State Parliament of Lower Saxony are elected every five years according to the principles of proportional representation combined with election of individuals. The state is divided into 87 constituencies. Of the total of 135 members of the State Parliament (at the moment 152) to be elected in principle under the Land elections law, 87 members of parliament are directly elected from the individual constituencies and hence from the different regions of the state by a simple majority, and the others through what are known as Land nominations.

Every voter has two votes: a first vote for a constituency nomination and a second vote for a Land nomination, i.e. a party list with a pre-determined order of candidates. Seats in the State Parliament are allocated on the basis of the result of the second vote alone, and therefore the term "second" vote, if taken to mean "of secondary importance", is misleading.

Seats are divided up among the individual parties according to what is known as the d'Hondt proportional election procedure. The votes cast for a party are repeatedly divided by 1, 2, 3 etc. until the results produce the same number of maximum figures as there are seats to be allocated. The seats are then assigned to each party in the order of the maximum figures thus determined. From the seats in the State Parliament calculated for each party are deducted the number of mandates that party has won directly in the individual constituencies. The remaining seats go to the candidates on the party's Land nomination not directly elected in the order shown on the nomination.

If one party wins more direct mandates than the number of parliamentary seats to which it is entitled according to its share of the total votes, that party can then keep these seats as "excess mandates". However, to preserve the relative weighting of votes for all the parties represented in parliament, the total number of seats - which would otherwise be 135 - is increased by twice the number of these "excess mandates". Mandates are then redistributed to all the parties entering parliament on the basis of the total number of seats thus determined.