Election Resources on the Internet: Elections to the Polish Sejm, Part I

The Republic of Poland held parliamentary elections on Sunday, October 15, 2023. The electoral systems used to choose members of both houses of the Polish legislature - the Senate and the Sejm - are reviewed in Part I of this presentation.

Poland's National Election Commission has live 2023 election results in Polish and English, as well as 2019 election results, also in Polish and English. National- and provincial-level results are available here for the following Sejm elections:

October 25, 2015	Results	Election Map

October 9, 2011	Results	Election Map

October 21, 2007	Results	Election Map

September 25, 2005	Results	Election Map

September 23, 2001	Results	Election Map

The election statistics presented in this space come from official results published by Poland's National Election Commission.

The Parliament of the Republic of Poland is composed of a lower chamber, the Sejm, and an upper chamber, the Senate. The Sejm has greater legislative power than the Senate: bills passed by the Sejm but rejected by the Senate become law if they are approved on a subsequent Sejm vote by absolute majority.

The Sejm is composed of 460 members directly elected by universal adult suffrage for a four-year term of office. Sejm seats are filled in forty-one multi-member constituencies, where political parties and coalitions of parties present lists of candidates. Voters indicate a preference for one candidate in one list.

Sejm seats are distributed in each constituency among qualifying lists by the largest average method of proportional representation (PR), also known as the D'Hondt rule. In order to participate in the distribution of constituency seats, a party list must obtain at least five percent of all valid votes cast at the national level, while coalition lists are required to obtain at least eight percent of the vote. However, lists representing national minorities are exempt from the electoral threshold requirements.

Elections to the Senate, which is composed of 100 members, take place under a plurality vote system in an equal number of single-member constituencies (previously forty multi-member constituencies). Electors vote for as many individual candidates as there are constituency seats to be filled: those attaining the largest number of votes in each constituency are elected for a four-year term of office.