The European Election voters are turning out across the country yesterday to have their say on Britain’s political future. But how many votes does it take to elect an MEP? In 2014, Pascal Arimont was elected as an MEP for the German-speaking region in Belgium with only 11,710 votes, while the Brothers of Italy party got more than one million votes but zero MEPs. Why did this happen?
During the 2014 European Elections, Belgium candidate Pascal Arimont was appointed as a Member of European Parliament after he attained 11,710 votes.
He was awarded the seat on behalf of the Christian Social Party for the German-speaking region of Belgium.
Mr Arimont’s 11,710 votes represented a 0.18 percent share of the votes for the country.
The German electoral college, which represents around 76,920 people according to population data in 2017, equates to just one MEP representative.
Mr Arimont was the only candidate for the German electoral college and therefore was awarded the MEP position, despite the relatively low number of votes at 11,710.
European elections 2019 results: Do you understand how the European Elections work?
In Italy, where the population size in much larger, a higher proportion of votes is required to be elected as an MEP.
The country has a 4 percent vote threshold.
In 2014, the Brothers of Italy won 1,006,513 votes which equated to 3.66 percent of the votes.
For each of the 73 MEPs Italy has, there is a vote threshold of at least four percent.
This means, each party is required to win at least four percent of the vote in order to have any elected MEPs.
In 2014, Brothers of Italy and four other parties failed to meet this minimum and therefore did not have any candidates from their parties elected.
After a review of the 1976 Electoral Act, there are new rules regarding these thresholds in certain cases for the allocation of seats.
At a national level, vote thresholds may not exceed 5 percent of valid votes cast.
Moreover, EU member states in which the list system is used shall set a minimum threshold for the allocation of seats for constituencies which comprise more than 35 seats.
This threshold shall not be lower than 2 percent, and shall not exceed 5 percent of the valid votes cast in the constituency concerned, including a single-constituency Member State.
In practice, this provision concerns only the largest member states and will not be an obligation until the next European Parliament elections in 2024.
How does this impact the UK?
The UK does not currently have any electoral thresholds.
Instead, votes are apportioned via the proportional representation voting system.
The voting system for the European elections is proportional representation.
This means that seats are allocated to parties according to the proportion of their share of the vote.
Political parties put forward names of candidates in rank order, the number of candidates being no more than the number of seats allowed for each region.
Seats are then allocated to each of the candidates depending on the vote share attained during the election.
READ MORE: How to vote in the European Elections?