votesseats1

Votesseats1 is a fictional term used in political science to illustrate how votes translate into legislative seats under proportional representation. It appears in teaching materials, tutorial datasets, and demonstration software as a simple, reproducible baseline for exploring apportionment concepts.

In its basic form, with a total of N seats and party votes V_i, the seat count S_i is estimated by proportional shares: S_i = round(V_i / V_total × N), where V_total is the sum of all votes. Some implementations use floor or other rounding rules, and may apply a positive threshold.

Votesseats1 is used to compare rounding rules, thresholds, and to illustrate how different apportionment methods affect outcomes. It is not tied to a specific country and serves as a neutral educational benchmark for experimenting with proportional allocation.

Limitations include the lack of district-level factors, district magnitude effects, and political constraints present in real elections. As a teaching or testing construct, it models proportional allocation but should not be treated as a predictive model.

See also: Apportionment methods, Proportional representation, D'Hondt method, Sainte-Laguë method, Electoral threshold.