38. How do General Assembly elections work?
General Assembly elections are held every ten weeks RT and use a proportional representation system. In essence, each citizen casts a vote for the party of their choice, and parties receive a percentage of seats in the General Assembly identical with their percentage of votes. Initially, those seats are filled from a party’s list of candidates, which it submitted to the Chief Registration Officer when applying for certification.
That is the way things are described and handled in-game. The actual electoral formula is a bit more complicated. What happens is that every player casts a vote; then, the number of votes received by each party is squared. Finally, a party’s percentage of the popular vote (and General Assembly seats) is calculated based on the squared votes.
For instance, let’s say Party A receives 10 votes and Party B receives 15 votes. Both numbers are squared, so Party A ends up with 100 votes (31%) and Party B with 225 (69%), for a total number of 325 votes. Reflecting their share of the squared vote, Party A receives 3 seats out of 9, Party B the remaining 6.
There are a number of reasons for using this formula: (1) ensuring that election results are dynamic (small changes in voting behaviour can have significant effects), (2) disadvantaging small parties so as to prevent their number from sky-rocketing, and (3) encouraging partisan integration of “blocs” of voters.
To illustrate that third point: let’s assume there are two “blocs” of voters (in this example, they will be the usual suspects, i.e. Right and Left). Let’s further assume that both “blocs” are equally strong, each getting a total of 15 votes from players.
In Scenario I, each “bloc” is united and votes for one party only; both of these parties will therefore get the same number of seats, as will the “blocs” overall (for the moment, let’s ignore the fact that the General Assembly actually has an uneven number of seats

).
In Scenario II, the Left is divided among different parties, while the Right is not:
Party A (Left): 4
Party B (Left): 6
Party C (Left): 5
Party D (Right): 15
In this Scenario, Party A’s votes, once squared, will work out to 16 (5%), Party B’s to 36 (12%), Party C will have 25 (8%), and Party D will receive 225 (75%) - for a total of 302.Consequently, Party A will receive no seats in the General Assembly, Parties B and C will get 1 each, and Party D will get a whole 7 seats out of the total 9. In other words, even though the Right and Left are equally strong, the Left’s chances at electoral success are reduced significantly because it is divided among a number of smaller parties.