Lower Saxony (Bundestag electoral district)

Members of the Bundestag for Lower Saxony are elected using a complex mixed-member proportional representation electoral system that has evolved over time. 1949 Electoral Act The Parliamentary Council of West Germany, a constituent assembly elected by Parliaments of the eleven states of West Germany, could not agree upon the electoral law to be included in the Basic Law, the constitution of the nascent nation. The Council instead established a special committee to draft an electoral law for the first federal election. In February 1949 the Council adopted an electoral law which would establish a mixed electoral system with 50% of seats elected using the first-past-the-post system and the other 50% via federal lists, and there would no electoral threshold. The Allied-occupying authorities objected to the new electoral as they considered that the Parliamentary Council was not competent to enact electoral law and only the states could do so. The minister presidents of the states referred the issue back to the Parliamentary Council which passed another electoral law on 10 May 1949 with a two-thirds majority. The Allied military governors objected to several parts of the new law and ordered changes to be made. In response, the minister presidents promulgated an amended electoral law on 15 June 1949, the "Electoral Act for the first Bundestag and the first Federal Assembly of the Federal Republic of Germany" (Wahlgesetz zum ersten Bundestag und zur ersten Bundesversammlung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland). On 5 August 1949 the minister presidents promulgated an amendment to the electoral law in relation to method of calculating the seat allocation in the upper-tier electoral districts. The amended law provided for 400 members of the Bundestag of which 58 would be elected from Lower Saxony. 1953 Electoral Act In July 1953 a new electoral law, the "Electoral Act for the Second Bundestag and the Federal Assembly" (), was enacted. The new law provided for 484 members of the Bundestag of which 66 would be elected from Lower Saxony. In December 1956 the Act was amended in relation to size of the Bundestag following the accession of Saarland to the federal republic. The Bundestag was to have 494 members (excluding the 22 non-voting members from West Berlin) but, unlike the previous Acts, seats weren't allocated to individual states which in effect meant seats were distributed amongst participating parties based on the national vote rather than on the state vote as previously. 1975 Electoral Act A new version of the Act was enacted in September 1975 but made no changes to electoral system. The method for allocating state seats was changed from D'Hondt to the largest remainder method with Hare quota in March 1985. In June 1990 the Act was amended to allow the accession of the East German states into the federal republic, increasing the size of the Bundestag from 496 to 656. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in September 1990 that the 5% national threshold violated the principle of equal voting rights as political parties from East Germany needed to increase their votes by a relatively larger amount than parties from West Germany in order to meet the threshold in a unified Germany. In response, the electoral law was amended in October 1990 to have separate 5% thresholds for East and West Germany and passing either one would allow the party to compete for upper-tier electoral district seats in the whole of Germany. This change was transitional and only applied to the subsequent election. 1993 Electoral Act A new version of the Act was enacted in July 1993 but made no changes to electoral system. In November 1996 the Act was amended to decrease the size of the Bundestag from 656 to 598 but this change wasn't applied until the 2002 federal election. The method for allocating state seats was changed from largest remainder to the Sainte-Laguë method (also known as the Schepers method) in March 2008. The existence of overhang seats at state level together with seats being allocated initially at the national level led to the possibility of negative vote weight - the more second votes a party received in a state in which it had overhang seats, the fewer overall seats it would end up receiving. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in July 1998 that this violated the princicple of equal votes enshrined in the Basic Law. In response, the Act was amended in December 2011 but in July 2012 the Constitutional Court ruled this too violated the Basic Law as it still raised the possibility of negative vote weight. The Act was amended again in May 2013 to meet the Constitutional Court's ruling. The main changes were that the seats were allocated initially based on second votes at the state level rather than on the national level, and the introduction levelling seats () to ensure that the final overall seat allocation was proportional to the second votes. The difference between the final national seat allocation and the minimum seat entitlement was the number of levelling seats. In order to mitigate this, the Act was amended in November 2020 so that any overhang seats in excess of three for a party in a state would be off-set by a commensurate reduction in the party's state seats in other states. At the 2021 federal election the Christian Social Union received 12 overhang mandates in Bavaria but, as it only competed in that state, its nine excess overhang seats could not be off-set by a reductions in state seats elsewhere and as result 104 levelling seats were needed to achieve proportionality. The size of the Bundestag was increased from 598 to 630 whilst the basic mandate clause was abolished. The calculation of the number of state seats won by each party was similar to the process used prior to the 2013 reform, with the exception that if a party won more constituency seats in a state than it was entitled to, its constituency winners were excluded from the Bundestag in decreasing order of their first vote share. ==Constituencies==