On Sunday 25 September, from 7 am to 11 pm, almost 50 million Italian citizens will be able to vote to elect the new parliament, which for the first time will be composed of 400 deputies and 200 senators. After the constitutional referendum of September 2020, the number of parliamentarians was in fact reduced from the current 945 to the future 600.
A fundamental role in the elections is played by the electoral law, which establishes the rules by which the number of votes cast by citizens is transformed into the number of seats assigned to the various parties in the chamber of deputies and in the senate. The current electoral law was approved in 2017, just before the 2018 political elections, and is known as the Rosato or Rosatellum law, named after its rapporteur Ettore Rosato, now president of Italia viva.
The functioning of the Rosatellum is by no means simple: there are many factors to consider for a conscious and informed vote.
First of all, to understand how the electoral law works, a first distinction must be kept in mind. Simplifying a bit, there are two types of electoral systems.
On the one hand, there are the majority systems, which divide the territory of a country into constituencies where candidates who get even one more vote than their challengers are elected. On the other hand, there are the proportional systems, which assign seats to parties in proportion to the votes they have received in the individual constituencies. Both of these systems have their strengths and weaknesses: in a nutshell, the majority tends to favor the formation of less fragmented parliaments, while the proportional tends to favor the representativeness of the voters.
The Rosatellum is a mixed electoral system: it is proportional for about two thirds of the seats assigned and majority for the other third. For this reason, parties have an incentive to stand together for the vote: in this way they can increase their chances of winning the seats assigned with the majority by presenting a common candidate.
The election of the chamber
In these elections 400 deputies will be appointed, of which eight abroad. For the election of the chamber, the Italian territory is divided into 28 constituencies: one per region, except for six regions, the most populous, which have several constituencies within them. In turn, the districts are divided into constituencies, portions of the territory that contain the electoral sections where citizens go to vote. The size and number of these constituencies were modified at the end of 2020, to make them consistent with the reduction in the number of parliamentarians (the map of the constituencies in the chamber can be consulted here).
There are two types of colleges, given the mixed nature of the Rosatellum. Three eighths of the 392 seats to be distributed in the chamber, or 147 seats, are assigned in the so-called single-member constituencies, the majority soul of the electoral law. Here the parties or coalitions present only one candidate, who challenges the others in a direct confrontation: the most voted is elected.
More complicated is the allocation of the remaining 245 seats, five-eighths of the total, those assigned in the so-called plurinominal constituencies, the proportional soul of the electoral law. There are 49 colleges and they allocate seats to parties in proportion to the number of their votes received. Here the parties present a list, with the names of a maximum of four candidates already chosen, alternating by gender: the first on the list (called leaders) are more likely to be elected. Gradually, the next on the list are elected, depending on how many votes a party has taken.
Without going into technical details, to calculate how many seats to assign to parties with the proportional ratio, at the national level the number of votes cast by citizens is divided by the number of seats to be assigned, thus obtaining a value, called the electoral quotient. Each party is assigned a number of seats equal to the number of times that the electoral quotient is included in the votes taken by the individual parties.
Since the votes may not correspond to the electoral quotient or its multiples, they generally have leftovers, which are then redistributed to the parties, generating unpredictable effects. YouTrend, a site that deals with polls and insights into politics, for example explained that through the so-called pinball effect, voters from one region can contribute with their vote to get a deputy elected in another region.
Not all parties can elect deputies to the chamber, because there are thresholds. A coalition must take at least 10 percent of the vote, while a party that goes alone at least 3 percent. If a party within a coalition takes less than 1 percent, its votes are not counted for the distribution of seats: they are effectively lost.
200 senators will be elected to the senate, four of them from abroad, with slightly different rules than the chamber. First of all, here there are 20 districts, one per region: the seats assigned with the single-member constituencies are 74, while those assigned with the proportional are 122, in 26 multi-member constituencies. These colleges were also redesigned at the end of 2020 (the map of the colleges in the Senate can be consulted here).
At the thresholds valid for the chamber, another is added: a party can elect senators if it takes 20 percent of the votes in at least one region. In reality, as the fact-checking site Pagella Politics explained, in the Senate the thresholds are higher, given that the election takes place on a regional basis, and not on a national basis, as in the chamber.
For example, Sicily assigns ten seats in the senate with the proportional ratio: a party that runs alone, to be sure to get at least one of these ten seats, will have to take at least 10 percent of the votes, much higher than 3 percent. percent set by the threshold (in reality, even a percentage slightly lower than 10 percent could be enough, depending on the number of parties that do not exceed the minimum thresholds). Smaller parties are therefore more disadvantaged than larger or coalesced ones.
The reduction in the number of senators risks having consequences on the representation of citizens. For example, large cities like Turin, Naples and Palermo will elect a single senator, who will have to represent hundreds of thousands of citizens in parliament. There are also similar limits to the chamber, where there are colleges that elect a single deputy even if they have population differences of over 150 thousand inhabitants.
The functioning of the electoral system is as complicated as the way in which the vote is expressed is simple. On 25 September, all voters will be given two ballots: one for the election of the chamber and one for the election of the senate, where the 25-year age limit for voting has been removed.
The names of the candidates in the single-member constituency and the list, or lists, which support it, with the names of the candidates in the multinominal constituency, will be shown on the card of the chamber and the senate.
To vote, a voter has three options: he can cross the box of a list, so his vote will be attributed to that list and to his candidate in the uninominal; he can cross both the box of the list and that of the single-member candidate, with the same effects as the previous option; or he can only cross the box of the single-member candidate. In this case, the vote is also attributed to the list that supports it and, if there is a coalition, the vote is distributed to the parties in proportion to the votes they took in the single-member constituency.
The so-called split vote is not valid, ie you cannot cross the box of a single-member candidate and that of a list that does not support it: in that case, the vote is null. There are no preferences (they are valid only for voting abroad): if you write the name of a candidate, the vote risks being canceled.