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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

So what's the maximum amount of seats that would be possible?

If one party won all districts 299, and had 0% of the party vote. You would come up with 897 seats in the Bundestag... which is not far from the expected seat number new week.

So it is pretty much a worst case already... I have some friends who might become Members of the Bundestag because of this, but even they are kind of irritated by that and know that nobody they will be talking to about their new seat will be happy about it.

Hm, as I understand it, if one party won all 299 direct mandates at 0% 2nd vote share, the other parties' seats would have to be increased until 299 == 0%. Depending on how you round, that would be at least 30,000 seats (there's some tolerance allowed that I did not consider here but that's the ballpark for that unlikely scenario).

The linked site lists a (more realistic) scenario already, where the number of seats comes out to more than 900. How did you end up at your 897 seat upper bound?

Actually, I should add that even in the unlikely extreme scenario, the upper bound would be the number of candidates on the parties' lists (Landeslisten). Even if a party would have a right to more seats, they cannot fill more than they have approved candidates on their lists. One could determine this actual upper bound by looking at each state's lists, which are public of course, but I haven't quickly found them compiled in one place, so I won't bother.

(Berlin's pirate party once won a surprisingly high share in the state parliament but wasn't able to fill all seats, because they were polling way lower when compiling their list.)

> (Berlin's pirate party once won a surprisingly high share in the state parliament but wasn't able to fill all seats, because they were polling way lower when compiling their list.)

That's not correct. They had 15 candidates and won 15 seats.

For all the nitty-gritty details check paragraph 4.5 on page 67 of the official election results [1].

[1]: https://www.berlin.de/wahlen/historie/berliner-wahlen/ergebn...

Apparently, this might actually happen this time. (https://twitter.com/mneunho/status/1435887122649686024).

If the Bundestag becomes as massive as predicted (800+), the CDU and AfD lists are too short.

As a funny aside - if the current Bundestag is 709 seats... where the hell are they planning to fit all these chairs?

(I know that lots of politicians never or rarely show up to parliament anyway, but I think the idea is that they have a fixed seat such that it becomes clear which segment of the parliament is physically taken up by which party)

http://europedirect.cut.ac.cy/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/201...

Fill in the visitor's balcony, I guess.

It's been a while since I visited in school, but IIRC the whole balcony is in a different security area. Also, I'm not sure the press would appreciate getting uninvited either.

Reroute the security zones. Tell the press to quit crying.

What's the other option, fill in the aisles? Given the frequency of terrorist attacks in Europe, preserving the ability of lawmakers to quickly leave a room seems more important than the feelings of journalists.

Search for "Bundesversammlung" (the constitutional body that elects the German president) to see some pictures of the Bundestag with 1260 seats. It's pretty crowded.. but not impossible. Although I doubt that they would have all these chairs permanently in the Bundestag.

Wow, TIL! Thanks!

It's definitely a crowded house, and much more of a temporary arrangement (it looks like they had to take out most of the desks and swivel chairs)!

That's not correct, the upper limit is much higher. If you win 299 districts and get 0.1% of the party vote, the Bundestag needs enough seats to properly represent 99.9% of the other parties. So you basically (it's somewhat more complicated in practice) need to multiply 299 by 999 to get the proper amount of seats..

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