This law is dated April 27, 1920, and was itself followed by an ordinance on May 1, 1920, which specifies each application.
I.—GENERAL PRINCIPLES.
The system according to which the delegates to the National Assembly were elected has not given complete satisfaction.
The principal objection made against it was directed above all against the law of November 30, which permits parties to unite their lists of candidates, a privilege from which the parties that lent themselves to neither alliance nor compromise naturally suffered. Such lists have been criticized as corrupting political morality and obscuring the results of elections.
But it has been also estimated that the division of representation in accordance with the Hondt system permits the stifling of small groups and that after the apportionment of seats in the different districts there are votes which secure no representation to the detriment of the small parties.
It is found also that the division of the territory of the Reich into electoral districts has been badly done, some districts being in a general way much too extensive. There are, as a rule, an average of eleven members per district in the National Assembly, and experience has shown that this number is too large for the members to be able to know well the needs of their districts and to maintain close contact with their electors.
It has been decided to abandon, therefore, the system of Hondt and to adopt an automatic system which was inscribed in Article 24 in the Constitution of Baden, and which is more customarily known as the Baden System. It is thus defined in the above-mentioned article: “Each party or group of electors is allowed one member for every ten thousand votes cast for its list of candidates. In each district the votes remaining unused are added up for the whole country and are apportioned representation according to the principle described above. Every fraction of more than 7,500 votes is permitted a seat.”
The originality of the system consists in this: First, the number of members, instead of being fixed according to the number of the population or of the electors, depends on the number of those actually voting, in such a way that not until after the elections can one count the number of members that will make up the assembly. The latter, therefore, will be more numerous if the electors are more numerous. There is also a superimposition of the tickets. The votes not utilized in the tickets of the first degree are reassembled on a list of the second degree where a new division of seats is made.