elections before 2018). Only parties that have received at least 4 percent of the vote nationally or 12 percent of the vote within the district can participate in this distribution of seats. In the second stage, the 349 seats are distributed through a calculation based on the total number of votes summed up across the entire country. In this distribution only parties that have received more than 4 percent of the national vote are included. Parties that fall below 4 percent nationally but have been awarded fixed seats in districts where they have had more than 12 percent of the vote are disregarded, and their seats are subtracted from the calculation. If a party has received 2 seats in this fashion, for example, the calculation will be made with 347 seats. Again the modified Sainte-Laguë method is used. In the third stage, a summary is made of the fixed seats that the parties have achieved, and this is compared to the outcome of the nationwide distribution above. If a party has received more fixed seats than its share of the total 349-seat distribution, district seats allocated to that party are retracted and given to the party with the second 'highest quotient'. The parties are then awarded a number of adjustment seats sufficient to cover the gap between their number of fixed seats and their share in the nationwide distribution. Finally, the adjustment seats that each party has received are distributed among the districts. The application of the Sainte-Laguë number gives each party a quotient ('comparison number', jämförelsetal) in each district, which is its number of votes in the district divided by (2n+1), where n is the number of seats it has been awarded. The district where the party has the highest quotient is awarded an adjustment seat, and a new quotient is then calculated for that district, before the next adjustment seat is distributed. In theory, a district can thus receive more than one adjustment seat. If a party is yet to receive a seat in the district, its quotient simply is the number of votes it received. When the fixed seats were distributed among the parties in the district, this number was divided by 1.4, which made it harder for a party to achieve its first seat. Now, however, no such division takes place. The method used is thus pure and not modified Sainte-Laguë. In local elections In elections