Mixed electoral systems have been adopted in a number of countries during the last two decades. Among the family of mixed compensatory systems, a few rely on a vote transfer system that helps parties that remain underrepresented in the single-seat district tier to win a quasi-proportional share of seats. Positive vote transfer systems combine single-seat district elections with compensatory mandates. Voters cast their votes for candidates in single-seat districts, who are elected with a plurality or majority of the votes in their districts. Votes expressed for non-winning candidates are not wasted, but instead transferred to the compensation tier, and summed up by party. Compensation mandates are allocated to each party, proportionally to the number of votes for non-winning candidates – so that the mechanism appears as a vote recycling procedure for wasted votes in the single-seat districts. These systems are usually classified as mixed electoral systems, but their capacity to secure a proportional seat allocation has so far not been investigated. This article shows that positive vote transfer systems (almost) never achieve the same degree of proportionality as PR or mixed compensatory systems. Usually, positive vote transfer systems establish a proportional seat allocation only if more than half of the seats are compensatory. Otherwise, the system only partly corrects for disproportionalities. Empirical tests rely on all six post-communist parliamentary elections in Hungary, the only country currently applying a positive vote transfer system in national elections, embedded in a complex, three-tiered electoral system.
