1. Okay I decided I'd do this at some point and I'm running out of time, so here it is. Here's the quick and dirty explainer on how South Korea's ridiculous new calculation system for party list National Assembly seats works.

2. Korea has two types of legislators: constituency and party lists. 47 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly are selected via party list.

Every voter casts two votes, one for the candidate of their choice in their district, and one for a party.

3. Until last time, the party lists vote was simple. If you get 10% of the party vote, you get 10% of the seats.

That's no longer the case. Korea now has a "linked" system, ostensibly to boost minor parties who are well-liked nationally but can't run strong local candidates

4. Here's how it works: the threshold is 3%. If your party has more than 3%, start by calculating how many seats you would have if every seat was proportional (let's call this X)

Then, calculate how many seats you actually have (constituency+proportional = Y)

5. Each party gets a "boost" equal to 50% of the difference.

Say you have 10% party vote (4.7 seats) and 5 constituency seats.

X = 300 * 10% = 30
Y = 47 *10% + 5 = 9.7

Your "boost" is 30-9.7=20.3*50% = 10 extra party list seats. Congratulations, you've doubled your seats!

6. That may sound reasonable, if a little convoluted. So why is it a terminally dumb idea?

Because somebody noticed that the oway to game this system is to have 0 constituency seats.

So... the major parties decided to split themselves into two.

7. Neither major party is running any party list candidates. Instead, they’ve created satellite parties with suspiciously similar signage and names.

Because both will have high support but no constituency seats, they are guaranteed to receive the maximum number of bonus seats.

8. These satellite parties are mostly made out of people from the main party who couldn’t get a constituency nomination and were told to take one for the team instead. Of course, this being Korean politics, they couldn’t even get that part right without drama.

9. In the conservative “Future Korea Party” the nominal party leader thought it would be a fun idea to stage a nomination coup against his bosses in the United Future Party. He was put into his place, and the party lists were purged and repopulated with handpicked UFP nominees.

10. The official liberal satellite is the “Together Citizen Party.” But a bunch of toxic liberal figures who couldn’t get a nomination decided to form their own party and claim to be the actual satellite. These are the “Open Democrats.”

11. So yes, not only does Korea now have satellite parties, it has fake satellite parties too.

(For the record, there are also a bunch of conservative minor parties who claim to be the UFP’s spiritual satellite. Including, drum roll... the New Pro-Park Party!)

12. What were people thinking!? Well, this was originally pushed by the minor parties in the National Assembly, who thought it would help them.

They got it through by holding the ruling party at gunpoint, making their votes on prosecutorial reform contingent on support for this.

13. The ruling party was so desperate to pass prosecutorial reform it didn’t stop the consider the obvious potential for gaming the system.

The Conservative party opposed, but when it passed, they were the first to go off and form a satellite. Credit for the ultra-cynical hustle