There is much less votes in the vicinity of Budapest than in Tolna or the city center
There is a constituency in the Budapest agglomeration where one and a half times as many people vote as in Tolna counties. Fidesz eventually voted to redraw the borders – even though the common opposition candidates were not in the picture at the time.
Ilona Pálffy, the previous president of the National Electoral Office, retired in the summer of 2020. When the representatives of the parties with the parliamentary faction met in farewell, the NVI’s proposals to amend the electoral laws were also discussed. Pálffy suggested again that the boundaries of the constituencies of Pest County should be redrawn, as the number of voters in them differs from the national average by a greater amount than specified in the law. And that means you need far more votes to get a seat than anywhere else. Ilona Pálffy’s proposal is finally in dialogue a few months later, at the end of 2020 Tímea Szabó provided to the National Assembly. Although pro-government deputies in the Legislative Committee supported the motion, they had already voted against it in the final vote, so it did not accept the majority, meaning disproportions persisted.
Uploaded to valasztas.hu document According to him, there are 7,760,090 eligible voters in the country, which means an average of 73,000 people per constituency. No district larger than 20 percent could deviate from this, yet this is happening in seven constituencies in Pest County, which encompass Budapest. (In the explanatory memorandum to Szabó’s bill, only two districts are listed at the end of 2020 as exceeding the 20 percent limit, but this would have led to a change in the boundaries of several constituencies to correct the differences.)
Most voters are in the 5th constituency of Pest County, based in Dunakeszi, where more than 97,000 people will decide the fate of their mandate on April 3, which is a third more than the national average. Meanwhile, in the 1st and 5th constituencies of Budapest, as well as in all three districts of Tolna county, the number of those entitled to vote does not even reach sixty thousand. In other words, there are far more than one and a half times as many voters in the Dunakeszi district as in the constituencies with the smallest population, which is extremely disproportionate.
The situation is similar in the 2nd constituency of Pest county (headquarters: Budakeszi), where 94,000 people can vote, but the number of voters is 92,000 in No. 3 (Szentendre) and No. 8 (Szigetszenmiklós). thousands in the 6th and 7th districts of Pest County (Gödöllő and Vecsés) and 89,000 in the 11th (Dabas).
There are a total of 64,000 voters living this week6, but we are talking about the ten least populated 415,000, or 230,000 fewer, and three more districts.
We looked at how the competition developed in these constituencies in the April 2018 parliamentary elections. Although Fidesz won everywhere in the seven constituencies of Pest County then, but due to the common opposition candidates, this may turn out differently in several agglomeration districts. If we add up the votes of the six opposition parties, there is only one severely “overpopulated” constituency where the government side would have won in the spring of 2018 even if there was only one common candidate running against it: it is the 11th constituency in Pest, where Károly Pánczél the votes were 50.94 per cent, while the candidates for Jobbik, the MSZP Dialogue and the LMP together received 47.35 per cent.
With this, the number of eligible persons does not reach 60,000 in any of the districts, wherever the Fidesz candidate is better than 50 percent, there is no choice in many places where the constituency enters, as the county borders must be kept in their formation. The other issue is that if only two constituencies remained in Tolna County instead of three, districts with a smaller population (87-88 thousand) would be created, such as Budakeszi, Dunakeszi, Szentendre, Szigetszentmiklós or Gödöllő and Vecsés, which should have been corrected.
The heat map below shows the number of eligible voters living in rural constituencies.
The average number of voters in Budapest is slightly lower than the national average, not reaching 71,000. In the 5th constituency (districts VI-VII) the least can vote (59 thousand), and the most (79 thousand) in the XIII. in District 7, which consists of a significant part of the district.