Method page
Proportional Approval: the cleanest fully proportional version
If you want to carry the simple approval ballot all the way through to a proportional Parliament, this is the destination. The price is not ballot complexity. It is the move to multi-member districts and the design choices that come with them.
Proportional Approval Voting
This is the full version of the idea: a genuinely proportional Parliament built from approval ballots in multi-member districts. Technically, this is a form of Sequential Proportional Approval Voting.
It is probably not the first reform Westminster would adopt. But it is the cleanest way to carry the simple ballot idea all the way through to a fully proportional result.
Strategic role in UK reform
If Britain wanted the cleanest fully proportional version
Proportional Approval is the cleanest way to keep the approval-voting thesis all the way through to a fully proportional Parliament. The main implementation hurdle is not the ballot instruction, which is simple, but the move to multi-member districts and the boundary work that comes with them.
Near-term use
Best advanced alongside district-magnitude planning, visualisation work, and wider public argument about regional representation.
Boundary logic
Use stable building blocks such as groups of constituencies, local authority clusters, and recognisable county or city regions.
Counting benchmark
For rough UK comparisons, Sainte-Lague is a better benchmark than D'Hondt because it is less biased toward the largest parties.
How You Vote
Your Ballot
Tick all candidates you approve of:
Select candidates to see how your ballot works
What Happens Next
- All ballots are collected and approvals counted
- The candidate with the most approvals wins the first seat
- Voters who helped elect that candidate have their ballot weight reduced (so they don't dominate all seats)
- The next most-approved candidate (by reweighted count) wins the next seat
- This continues until all seats are filled
Key insight: By reducing the weight of "already represented" voters, the system ensures that different groups of voters each get proportional representation.
Why Proportional Approval?
📊 True Proportionality
Seats directly match vote share. If 15% of voters approve your candidates, you get approximately 15% of seats.
✅ Simple Ballot
One ballot, one instruction: tick all candidates you approve of. That's it. No ranking, no complex preferences.
⚡ Fast Counting
Results on election night. Just add up approvals for each candidate—no multi-round elimination.
🎯 Consensus Winners
Candidates with broad support get elected. Divisive candidates who appeal only to their base lose to those with wider appeal.
🗳️ No Wasted Votes
Every approval counts toward electing someone. No more voting in safe seats where your vote changes nothing.
🤝 Honest Voting
No need for tactical voting. Approve all candidates you genuinely like—you can't hurt your favourites by also approving others.
How It Works
Cast Your Ballot
Approve (tick) any candidates you find acceptable from the full list
Count All Approvals
Each candidate receives a count of their total approvals
Elect Sequentially
The candidate with most approvals wins a seat. Voters who elected them have reduced weight for the next round.
Repeat Until Full
Continue until all seats are filled, ensuring proportional representation
Transition and District Design
District magnitude matters
Proportional Approval works best in districts large enough to reflect the UK’s real party pluralism. Very small districts behave more like majoritarian contests; medium sizes are the practical sweet spot.
Use practical geographies
A UK rollout would not need to invent geography from nothing. It could group present constituencies into stable multi-member units aligned where possible with local-authority or combined-authority footprints.
Fit reform sequencing
If Westminster wins PR first through AMS/MMP, Proportional Approval can still serve as the next-step argument for simplifying ballots and moving to a cleaner multi-member model later.
📐 The Reweighting Mechanism
The key to proportionality is how voter weights are adjusted after each seat is filled. When a candidate you approved wins:
- Your ballot weight decreases (because you've successfully elected someone who represents you)
- Voters who haven't elected anyone yet keep their full weight
- This means the next round favours candidates supported by currently-unrepresented voters
The result: if 30% of voters approve only Green candidates, Greens will win approximately 30% of seats—even if other candidates have higher raw approval counts.
Common Questions
Isn't this just approval voting for multi-winner elections?
Yes, exactly! Proportional Approval extends the simplicity of approval voting to multi-winner contexts. Instead of just electing the single most-approved candidate, it elects multiple candidates proportionally.
What about local representation?
In a Proportional Approval system, you'd vote in a regional constituency (e.g., "Greater Manchester" with 10 seats). All elected MPs from your region would be accountable to voters there. You wouldn't have one specific "your MP," but you'd have several MPs from your region, likely including one who shares your views.
Can I just approve one candidate?
Yes! You can approve as few or as many candidates as you like. Approving just one is perfectly valid. However, approving more candidates you find acceptable increases the chance that at least one of them gets elected.
Does approving more candidates hurt my favourite?
No. This is a key advantage of approval voting. Approving additional candidates never reduces the chances of your favourite winning. You can approve your first choice AND several backup choices without any downside.
How is this different from STV?
Both are proportional multi-winner systems, and both deserve to be taken seriously. The main difference is how they ask voters to express support:
- STV: You rank candidates. Votes transfer through quotas and eliminations, which can be slower to count and harder to explain.
- Proportional Approval: You approve candidates. Votes are reweighted after each seat. The ballot is simpler even though the proportional logic is still real.
So the critique here is trade-off based, not sectarian: STV has a strong pedigree, but Proportional Approval keeps the same proportional ambition with a more legible voter experience.
Where is this used?
Variations of proportional approval voting are used in some professional associations and organizational elections. Sweden uses a form of approval voting for some elections. The system is gaining academic attention as a simpler alternative to STV.
🎯 The Bottom Line
Proportional Approval gives you the simplicity of approval voting with the fairness of proportional representation. It is the strongest approval-based case for a fully proportional Westminster, especially once multi-member district reform is politically achievable.
Your job is simple: tick all the candidates you'd be happy to have represent you. The system does the rest.
Deeper dive
Explore multi-member districts in practice
If you want to understand STV or fully proportional approval systems, you eventually have to ask a geography question: how big should districts be, and what happens as they get bigger?
That is what the visualiser is for. It lets you group today’s Westminster constituencies into larger districts and see how district size changes proportionality, local scale, and ballot pressure.
What it helps explain
- Why multi-member districts matter to both STV and proportional approval
- How district magnitude changes the tradeoff between local link and proportionality
- Why stable geographies such as local authority groupings are politically useful
Open the district visualiser
Use the live tool to see how grouped districts change the map and why district size matters.
Open visualiser