By Steven Hill

Much handwringing has resulted since Hamas, a group on the Bush administration's terrorist list, won a sizable majority of legislative seats in Palestinian Authority elections in January. But the planners of the recent elections there could have learned a thing or two from European election conventions, such as those in effect in the Czech Republic.

The problem is that the electoral system used for the elections gave grossly unrepresentative results in which Hamas won nearly a super-majority of seats even though the party did not win even a majority of votes. If the Palestinians had employed electoral methods of the kind better known here, the story would have turned out very differently.

The Palestinian elections used a combination of the U.S.-style winner-take-all electoral system and a more European-style proportional voting system. Palestinian voters had two votes, one for their favorite political party (the proportional vote) and another for individual candidates (the winner-take-all vote). Unfortunately, the winner-take-all part broke down and Hamas won many more seats than the vote should have given it.

Look at the actual results: In the proportional vote, which is a national vote and therefore the best measure of the overall support for each political party, Hamas won about 45 percent of the popular vote and about the same percentage of seats — 30 of 66, no majority there. The incumbent party, Fatah, won about 41 percent of the popular vote and 27 of 66 seats, only three behind Hamas.

So the election was actually quite close, and if those were the only election results, Hamas would not have won a majority of seats and would have needed to form a coalition with other political parties. A likely possibility is that Hamas would have formed a grand coalition with Fatah, which would have provided a stable transition.

Instead, the winner-take-all seats, which are allocated by districts, completely threw the election to Hamas. Though Hamas and Fatah had nearly equal support nationwide, Hamas won 46 of 66 seats — 70 percent — in the winner-take-all districts and Fatah won only 16 district seats.

Overall, Hamas won a stunning 58 percent of legislative seats even though the party's national support was around 45 percent. It was a tragic breakdown of the electoral system. Instead of talking about negotiating a coalition government for the Palestinians, the talk now is about picking through the shards and figuring out how to salvage the roadmap to peace.

It didn't have to be this way. The designers of democracy in Palestine might have benefited by taking a leaf from the electoral systems used by emerging democracies in Central Europe. Under the Czech system, for example, political parties win legislative seats in proportion to the percentage of vote garnered. In fact, in its Dec. 15 election Iraq used a system similar to this one, where each political party was awarded legislative seats in direct proportion to the votes it won in each of 18 provinces.

Because of Iraq's proportional method, when the dominant Shi'ite party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, it also failed to win a majority of legislative seats. Surely if a winner-take-all method like that used in the Palestinian elections had been in effect, the Shi'ite bloc would have won a strong legislative majority even though the party lacked a popular majority.

Instead, the Shi'ites in Iraq are forced to negotiate with their legislative partners, including the Sunnis and Kurds, to produce a government that preserves the fragile consensus in Iraq.

It is really a shame that, for all the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid poured into the Palestinian Authority, no one had the sense to make sure the elections were conducted using a method that would guarantee representative results. Interestingly, in recent years, certain Czech leaders have proposed changing the electoral system to incorporate more U.S.-style winner-take-all features. As the Palestinian election shows, that easily can lead to unintended consequences and unrepresentative legislatures.

It is felt by some Czech leaders, like President Václav Klaus, that a winner-take-all system, or perhaps one that mixes winner-take-all with proportional representation, would lead to greater stability than the purely proportional voting system now in use. But, as the Palestinian election shows, such a mixed system may not lead to greater stability at all.

And even in the United States, the winner-take-all system has led not so much to stability as to an utter lack of competition for most legislative elections. Out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, perhaps 30 of them — fewer than 7 percent — will be competitive in the November elections. Three-fourths will be won by huge landslide margins, and the state legislatures are even less competitive. Most elections are pale farces of competition that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud.

As competition has decreased, so has voter participation, with only 38 percent of voters bothering to vote in the 2002 U.S. elections (the previous nonpresidential election year). Op-ed pages from The New York Times to the conservative Wall Street Journal have made the case for an overhaul. Italy, after adopting a mixed system by adding some winner-take-all district seats to their proportional representation, is now in the process of getting rid of the winner-take-all elections. The evidence is clear that winner-take-all elections easily can lead to unintended consequences and unrepresentative legislatures.

While various political analysts are saying Hamas' victory is a disaster built on short-sighted policies by the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel and the United States, the truth is a bit more mundane. Hamas' overwhelming victory is the result of a poorly designed electoral system. Unfortunately, when you are trying to jumpstart democracy, the devil is in the details.