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Re:Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America by ryusage on Thursday November 08, 2012 @01:57PM (#4759249)
You're correct. Their voting system uses proportional representation, in which each party receives a number of seats proportional to the percentage of votes they received.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Netherlands#Pol...

Re:Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America by Someone on Thursday November 08, 2012 @03:06PM (#4759577)
In addition, the Netherlands does not have an election threshold. A party that gets 1/150 of the votes gets one of the 150 seats in parliament.

That is different from, for example, Germany, where seats are proportionally distributed among parties that got at least 5% of the votes.

So, the theoretical maximum number of parties in parliament is 150 in the Nethelands, but 20 in Germany.

Re:Fact-checkers: Talking crap in Holland v America by el_chapitan on Thursday November 08, 2012 @02:26PM (#4759403)
It may just be the "this is the way we've done it in America" in me talking. But I'd probably be OK if we at least had some sort of instant runoff voting, or something similar which didn't make the voter strategize between choosing a candidate that they most agree with and choosing between the lesser of two evils.