Looking for a D’Hondt calculator? Try here.
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The Webster/Sainte-Laguë method is used in many electoral systems around the world, most notably in Germany, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden. But as with most proportional systems, although they produce fairer results they can be very difficult to figure out without some complex calculations.
This calculator can help you calculate the number of seats to award by proportional representation for an election using the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method.
This method uses the formula:
Co-efficient = Votes / ( (2 * Seats Earned) + 1 )
This makes it slightly more complicated than the D’Hondt formula (which you can find a calculator for here), but this calculator will help you award seats at the click of a button.
It also features support for an electoral threshold, which is a certain percentage (often 5%) of the vote that a party must win before it is awarded any proportional seats.
Click here to download the Webster/Sainte-Laguë calculator (in Microsoft Excel Macro-Enabled format)
Has this resource been helpful to you? It would be greatly appreciated if you could donate a couple of dollars to keep the site up and running!
UPDATE 14th April 2019: Code fixes and improvements
UPDATE: 9th March 2021 – Added Creative Commons license to allow for adaptation of the work
hey ? i wanted to ask in the D’Hondt there was no requirements for threshold , to be sincere i do not understand threshold for waht it is ? Can you explain?
Thank You
Good Luck
I’ve updated it to include threshold now 🙂
Hey, I was having trouble using more than 10 regions for the calculator, if I tried to move the tables the whole thing wouldn’t work and crash. Is there a way to fix this (I’m only really looking to have 12 regions)
Regards,
Archie
Hey Archie,
Originally the code was only set up for 8 regions, so it wouldn’t have been able to pick up if you added regions to it in Excel without looking at the code powering it.
I’ve added in 4 more regions to the 6-party calculator, and I’ve made the second sheet a 12-party calculator with 12 regions too. You should be able to re-download the calculator and use it now!
Hope it helps and if you’ve got any questions or comments just let me know 🙂
Thanks, this is great. Very Helpful.
I put it to use here: https://nicksomervillepolitics.blogspot.co.nz/2017/06/what-uk-election-would-have-looked-like.html
Thanks,
Nick
Good idea, but it seems to break apart when there are more than 650000 total votes and the threshold is 5%. Feel free to contact me to get an example.
Hi Nikolai, thanks for letting me know. I’ve fixed some issues with how thresholds were calculated and it should be available in the download now. If there’s any further issues just let me know!