General ticket

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The general ticket, also known as party block voting (PBV) or ticket voting,^[1] is a type of block voting in which voters opt for a party, or a team's set list of candidates, and the highest-polling party/team becomes the winner. Unless specifically altered, this electoral system (at-large voting) results in the victorious political party receiving 100% of the seats. Rarely used today, the general ticket is usually applied in more than one multi-member district, which theoretically allows regionally strong minority parties to win some seats, but the strongest party nationally still typically wins with a landslide.

This system is largely seen as outdated and undemocratic due to its extreme majoritarian results, and has mostly been replaced by party-list proportional (allowing fair representation to all parties) or first-past-the-post voting (allowing voters to vote for individual candidates in single-member districts). Similarly to first-past-the post and other non-proportional district based methods it is highly vulnerable to gerrymandering and majority reversal (when the party getting the most votes does not win the most seats). An example for the latter is the US Electoral College, the members of which are (overwhelmingly) elected using the general ticket.

In modern party-list systems, a full or partial return by the party-list proportional system is common. The partial return is referred to as a majority bonus or majority jackpot system, such modern systems award winners among more than the highest-polling party, if a low vote threshold is reached by a minority party, and often are counterweighted to do justice to the overall votes cast for smaller parties. This is used in France and Italy for a third and fifth of their regional councillors respectively, generally who then serve the region at-large.