Election Commission shares info on proportional election system-
All clusters and 50% women nomination compulsory

September 8, Kathmandu-
The Election Commission of Nepal conducted a training seminar on how to prepare closed list of the cnadidates for proportional election system yesterday. Held at Yello Pagoda, the seminar included addresses by the Chief Election Commissioner, Secretary of the E C, and technical experts along with background and historical perspective on proportional system.

When classified by population size, the dominance of plurality-majority systems becomes even more pronounced, with parliaments elected by First Past The Post (FPTP), Block Vote (BV), Alternative Vote (AV) or Two-Round System (TRS) methods representing collectively 2.44 billion people (59 percent of the total). Proportional representation electoral systems are used in countries totaling 1.2 billion inhabitants, and semi-PR systems are used to represent just under half a billion people. In our survey the seven countries which do not have directly-elected national parliaments constitute 1.2 billion people, but China makes up 99 percent of that figure.

Individually, First Past the Post systems are the most popular, with 68 out of 211 nation-states and related territories giving them 32 percent of the total, followed by the 66 cases of List PR systems (31 percent). But when it comes to people, FPTP systems are used in countries which contain almost twice as many people as those in List PR countries. The 1.8 billion figure in Table One is inflated by India (913 million) and the United States (263 million), but FPTP is also used by many tiny Caribbean and Oceanian islands as well. The largest country that uses List PR is Indonesia with 191 million people, but it is predominantly a system used by middle-sized Western European, Latin American and African countries. Next in order are Two-Round Systems (15 percent) and Parallel systems (9 percent). While TRS systems are used in more countries, Parallel systems are used by more people. This is largely because Russia (148 million inhabitants) and Japan (125 million) use classical Parallel systems.