Proposal would give Southwest constituency four more MPs

A working group appointed by the Minister of Justice has proposed changes to Iceland’s election laws that would give the Southwest constituency four additional members of parliament at the expense of the Northwest and Northeast constituencies, mbl.is reports.

The group recommends reducing the number of constituency seats to six in each of Iceland’s six constituencies, with the remaining 27 parliamentary seats allocated as equalisation seats.

It also proposes distributing all parliamentary seats proportionally among the constituencies according to the number of registered voters in each, and changing the rules for allocating equalisation seats to individual constituency lists. The aim would be to make the allocation more stable and more similar to a purely constituency-based distribution.

The Ministry of Justice said the group’s report and a draft bill would be submitted to Alþingi, Iceland’s parliament, which will decide on the next steps. It said all parliamentary groups should be involved in changes of this kind to the election laws.

Ólafur Þ. Harðarson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Iceland, led the group. Its other members were Sigrún Helga Lund, a professor of statistics at the university, and Þorkell Helgason, a professor of mathematics.

The proposals would replace the current D’Hondt method for allocating parliamentary seats with the John Adams method. The report says the Adams method favours smaller constituencies more than other proportional methods, which favour larger constituencies.

Under the proposed changes, the Northwest constituency would go from seven constituency members to six, while the Northeast would fall from 10 to seven. The South constituency would remain at 10, and the Southwest would rise from 14 to 18. The South Reykjavík and North Reykjavík constituencies would each remain at 11 members.