Queen Lion of the Animal Kingdom is looking to improve her democracy.

She recently allowed citizens to elect representatives to the Jungle Council which governs the kingdom.

However, she recognizes that her citizens are not happy with the voting system.

Let's watch an election on one of the small islands of her kingdom to see why.

On this island there are three political parties, the two big ones, Kia and Tuatara, and

a small third party, Kakapo.

On election day, the citizens each cast one vote for a local candidate they want to represent

the range they live in.

The results are as follows, with the average across the island that Tuatara gets 49%,

Kia gets 48%, and Kakapo gets 3%. The election is run using first-pass-the-post, meaning that the candidate with the most votes wins.

Because Tuatara got the most votes in each range, they get to control 100% of the seats on the council.

And this is why so many citizens are unhappy.

The majority of them, the 51% who voted for other parties, get no representation on the council at all.

This seems unfair to Queen Lion, but she's not sure how to fix it.

The citizens like having local representatives and don't want to change the range boundaries.

But luckily Kiwi, one of the citizens of this island, has a suggestion for Queen Lion on how she can make the system better

while keeping local representation

and leaving the ranges as they are. The idea is called mixed member proportional, or MMP,

and it makes two changes. The number of seats on the council is doubled and each citizen

now gets two votes, not one. Here's how it works. At first, election day for Kiwi is just

the same as before. He gets a list of candidates running to represent his local range on the council.

Kiwi picks one, and the winner will be the candidate with the most votes.

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