>>>>Any time a voter votes for a politician who loses, his vote goes for nothing. It shouldn't. In our latest election, the Green Party received 6.8% of the vote - almost 1,000,000 votes. In spite of that, they have no seat in parliament.
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>>>That really is ridiculous. What's the threshold (*) - 7%, 10%? Or is it the trick of gerrymandering or some such?
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>>We don't have a proportional system. There is no threshold. They simply lost in every riding in which they ran. That means no seats regardless of how many votes they received overall.
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>Then it becomes equivalent to a 50% treshold locally. You are as represented as many places you can muster where you are a majority. You can have 49% everywhere and end up with zero seats, if you don't have 51% anywhere.

That would be true in a 2 party system, but we have far more than that. We have 4 major parties and an up and comer which will mean 5 major parties before long. There is also a smattering of other parties that are lucky to get a few votes here and there. A party could conceivably win a riding with 21% of the vote if the rest of the votes were almost evenly split over the other 4 parties. (not that it's likely, of course). In that case, the party with 21% would get a seat and the others splitting 79% would get 'thanks for playing'.

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>>>I've heard it argued that even 3% would be too high (then, for instance, an imaginary American Hebrew Party would never get a chair) specially when one has in mind that minorities are people and have their own minds and don't necessarily think that their minority parties are representing their interests, so they may cast a part of their vote to regular parties; even a 10% minority may so end up without a single representative if the bar is too high.
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>>In a straight proportional system, this would not be an issue. The only way a party would fail to get a seat would be if they didn't have enough votes to round up to a seat.
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>Yep, then the round(100/NumberOfSeats, 0) is the bar. Actually, half of that, plus one :).