by Max Barry

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Region: CISB

Nogodia

VidNet: The Clips To Be Seen

The 1983 Election: A Disaster Story

JakobSSC (5.6M)

So, imagine that your country just got rid of a fairly authoritarian system that relied on a wonky, first-past-the-post system to keep a single bloc in power for... a really long time. Naturally, people want to reform the government, and for everyone in charge of the transition authority, adding more seats, an upper house, and implementing a single-transferable-vote system seemed like a good idea.

Yeah... That is until this absolute disaster ensued.

Cuts to the infamous 3,000 seat Okebrut

In case you're wondering, even if the parties look like they share colors, they're not from the same ideology. I'm pretty sure the graphic designers responsible for making the official chart suffered carpal tunnel syndrome from the unfathomably herculean effort it would have taken. In a 3,000 seat lower house where there were no less than 609 political parties represented, trying to form a government was apocalyptic. To add to the misery, most of the small parties had multiple seats, meaning the Big Nine actually needed to wade into the hellish pits of the 1st Okebrut to find coalition partners. Since there wasn't even a building to house an assembly this large, the gardens of Sky Manor needed to be converted into an outdoor assembly. Even then, this arrangement only fit 2,300 of the Okebrutans, so the officials had to draw lots to see who would get to sit on a couch inside of the Manor until a suitable proceeding hall was constructed. Naturally, the government decided that this was a horrible idea, but the question arose of whether they could retroactively change the number of seats, and which ones would need to be sacrificed.

By the end of the first month, absolutely no bills had been passed, and there were six well-defined voting blocs that had minimal cooperation with the others. Sick of the legislative failure, President Androv decided to put the national referendum to the test. On April 2nd, millions flocked to the polls to decide if they wanted to replace the electoral dysfunction, and unsurprisingly, it was a landslide vote to fix the system. By the next election in 1985, there was a significantly lowered number of seats, although the STV and "three-per-constituency" rules were kept.

So, how did the government drain the sea of seats? It's actually quite simple. By looking at the least populated territory that should have its own constituency (in this case, Pen Island with its 420,000 people in 1985), the government decided to set 400,000 as a "baseline" for a single constituency. At the time, the national population was around 90 million, which totaled out to a nice 225 x 3 seats. 675 was a huge improvement, and it kept the building costs down.

Since that fateful reform, the country has grown significantly. As of the 2020 census results, we boast a mighty 138 and a half million people, boosted greatly by a huge post-Spring baby boom. In 2000, the system was again reformed with 500,000 people, and a bit more or less, becoming the population baseline after Zlomich Island, with 503,000 people, became the least populated area in the country. Thanks to the revised statistics, the Okebrut now consists of 831 seats, a far cry from 3,000. But with a possible reform on the way, it is very well possible that the constituency baseline may change once again.

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