With European and local elections on Saturday, many voters are busy mulling how to cast their vote, as parties and candidates jockey for position. But scratch beneath the surface and confusion about how Malta’s voting system works still reigns among many voters.

What happens to your vote when your preferred candidate gets eliminated? How is a quota calculated? And how can you maximise the impact of your vote? We delve into some of the burning questions playing on voters’ minds.

What is Malta’s voting system?

Malta has been using the single transferable vote (STV) system for the best part of a century. Often touted as one of the most representative voting systems in the world, STV allows voters to directly vote for the representatives they want to elect across different parties.

In practice, voters in Malta vote for a candidate, not a party. Although it may seem counterintuitive, given Malta’s hyper-partisanship, the system is designed for voters to elect their preferred candidate, rather than to vote for a political party.

This is especially true of an MEP election, which aims to elect six individuals to the European Parliament, with one party’s victory over the other serving little tangible purpose, other than bragging rights.

Malta’s six EP seats had been split evenly between PL and PN until 2019, when Labour’s landslide victory saw the party take a fourth EP seat at PN’s expense.

PN will be hoping to regain a third seat this time around, although the strong polling of independent candidate Arnold Cassola means that it is very much for grabs.

Ultimately, the fate of the sixth seat may well come down to how votes are inherited down the line.

How does the single transferable vote work?

At its core, the STV is very simple.

Each voter has a single vote that can be transferred as many times and across as many different parties or candidates as they like.

Voters rank their preferred candidates, giving their 1 to their first-choice candidate, their 2 to their second choice and so forth.

A person can vote for a candidate from one party, give their second preference to a candidate from another party, their third to an independent candidate and keep going until they have voted for all the candidates they like. A voter can even vote for all 39 candidates on the ballot sheet, if they’d like to.

This vote makes its way across all the different candidates the voter has selected, until it eventually finds its way to someone who is eventually elected or until all the candidates the voter has chosen have been eliminated.

In this way, the system ensures that there are no wasted votes.

When a candidate reaches a certain number of votes (known as the quota) they are elected.

What is the quota and how is it calculated?

The quota is the number of votes needed for a candidate to get elected. Once the candidate reaches that number, they are guaranteed a seat.

The exact quota is calculated by counting the total number of valid votes cast and dividing it by the number of seats available, plus one seat and one vote.

So, with Malta electing six MEPs, the quota will be the total number of valid votes cast divided by seven, plus one vote.

The exact quota will only be known after voting has closed and authorities know how many valid votes were cast. But the quota usually hovers around the 35,000-vote mark and experts believe this is likely to be the case once again.

Malta has some 370,000 eligible voters for Saturday’s MEP election. If, as most polls predict, the turnout is somewhere between 70% and 75%, this would translate into roughly 250,000 valid votes, once invalid votes are discarded. This would result in a quota that is just under 36,000 votes, although this could change if more or fewer people than predicted turn up to vote.

How are votes counted and transferred?

Votes are counted across different rounds. In the first round of counting, all first preference votes (that is, all 1 votes) are tallied up.

If nobody is elected on the first count (that is, no candidate reaches the quota), then the candidate who received the least number of first preference votes is eliminated from the race and their votes are transferred to other candidates, according to voters’ rankings.

This continues, with the bottom-ranked candidate eliminated each time, until the six seats are filled.

If, on the other hand, one or more candidates receive more first-count votes than the quota, their surplus votes move to other candidates in a second round of counting, according to the second preference listed by voters.

How are surplus votes transferred?

This is where things get a little more complicated.

The system uses a rather complex calculation to distribute surplus votes in a proportional way. Let’s take a real-life example to see how this would work.

According to polls, both Roberta Metsola and Alex Agius Saliba could well receive more first-count votes than the quota, leaving them with a pool of surplus votes that would need to be transferred to other candidates.

Electoral expert Hermann Schiavone explains: If, for instance, Metsola receives a total of 50,000 first-count votes, which turns out to be 10,000 votes more than the quota, the system will examine all the 50,000 votes she received to determine who voters listed as their second preference.

If it finds that a quarter of all Metsola’s voters listed another PN candidate as their second preference and a tenth choose an independent candidate as their second preference, then those ratios will be applied to her 10,000 surplus votes.

So, in practice, the other PN candidate will inherit 25% of her 10,000 surplus votes (2,500 votes) and the independent candidate will receive 10% of her votes (1,000 votes).

The bigger the surplus, the more votes there are to transfer. So, if there were 20,000 surplus votes, rather than 10,000, that 25% share would translate to 5,000 votes moving to the other PN candidate and 2,000 to the independent candidate.

The same would, of course, apply in Agius Saliba’s case.

When does my vote stop being transferred?

There are two situations where a person’s vote stops moving from one candidate to the next.

The first is when it finally reaches a candidate who it helps elect. So that vote would have helped get someone elected, even if it’s after several rounds of counting and the candidate isn’t listed as one of the top-ranked candidates on that particular vote.

The second is when all the preferences listed on the vote have been exhausted and there is nobody else that it can be transferred to. So, for instance, if a voter only lists three preferences and all three candidates are eliminated, then that vote’s journey ends there.

In practice, the more candidates a person votes for on their ballot sheet, the greater the chance of their vote counting towards someone’s election.