to the county councils, the same principles are followed, with the following differences: only parties that have received more than 3 percent of the vote in the county are able to participate in the distribution of seats. There is no 12 percent clause or other possibility for parties that fall below this threshold to gain seats. Finally, the number of adjustment seats is one tenth of the number of seats in the county council. If one tenth is a fractional number (which it always is, since the number of seats in a county council is required to be odd), the fraction is always adjusted upwards, so a county council with 51 seats would have 45 fixed seats and 6 adjustment seats. Norway Leveling seats were introduced in Norway in the 1989 parliamentary election when there were 8 such seats. Since 2005, there are 19 leveling mandates, one for each county. Its current form is based on the following principles: In order to be eligible for leveling seats, a party must get at least 4% (the exclusion threshold) of the national popular vote. A party may attain enough votes in a given county to elect a representative but may fail to be eligible for leveling seats. The number of representatives elected per county is a function of the total population in the county and the area of the county. Hence, the county of Finnmark needs fewer votes to elect a representative (7,409 in 2005) than Oslo (18,167 the same election). Of 169 representatives, 150 are elected by popular vote within the county. This means that a party that achieves 40% of the popular vote in a county will send about 40% of the total number of representatives from that county. The remaining 19 representatives are allocated one to each county but are elected based on nationwide results for a party, as long as the popular vote at the national level for that party exceeds the exclusion threshold of 4%. The result is that each representative represents an approximately equal number of voters. In the 2005 elections, the average number of votes on a national level was largely similar across party lines. The largest party, the Norwegian Labour Party, required the fewest votes per representative with 14,139; the party that needed the most votes was the Christian Democrats, with 16,262. On a county by county basis, however, there were greater disparities: Sogn