A parliamentary vote is one in which the members of parliament (MPs) of a polity (either a sovereign state or a republic) cast their votes on legislation that has passed through the legislature. The resulting votes are recorded and counted by the MPs who make up the parliament, which is sometimes called either the House of Commons or the Lok Sabha.
Voters typically choose a political party, and a majority of the parties select their leader to be the Prime Minister, who leads the executive branch of government along with the department ministers that are elected. Some ceremonial executive duties are carried out by a symbolic head of state, either a hereditary monarch in a constitutional monarchy or a democratically elected president or chancellor in a democratic constitutional republic.
The legislative branch of a parliamentary system is usually made up of representatives of political parties, although independents may be elected as well. Some parliamentary systems use plurality voting in multi-member constituencies, while others are single-member – or a mixture of both. In a few of the systems that use proportional means of allocating seats, the boundaries drawn to define electoral districts can have an impact on the overall election results.
If a candidate has more than 50 per cent of the first preference votes they are declared the winner. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the candidates with the fewest first preference votes are eliminated. Their second preference votes are reallocated to the remaining candidates, and this process continues until a candidate has more than 50 per cent. Up to and including 2023 elections for Mayors in England and Police and Crime Commissioners in England used Single Transferable Vote (STV).