It is a simplification, but that's how it works in practice (under certain assumptions). The votes are counted both per district, and per entire country. The original (pre-Orbán) system was designed in a way that simultaneously achieved these two things: * people could vote for a representative from their own district * the proportions of the political parties in parliament reflected how many votes in the entire country they received Both of these properties are desirable (in my opinion), but in the most simple implementations, they allow gerrymandering. As a simple example, if each district can nominate 1 representative, and there happen to be exactly 60% fans of Party A, and 40% fans of Party B in each district... the result of a naive implementation is that in each district a representative of A wins, and the parliament is 100% Party A. The pre-Orbán system had a way to fix this. Yes, each district would elect a representative of the Party A. But then, the votes would be counted for the entire country, and if the result is that 60% of people want A, and 40% want B, additional representatives would be selected (country-wide, now ignoring the individual districts) so that the resulting parliament would contain 60% of representatives from Party A, and 40% of representatives from Party B. (This contains some simplifications.) ...is my impression from reading about the system online; I am not Hungarian. When Orbán won for the first time, he had a majority sufficient enough to tweak the law in a way that it no longer does this. Instead of balancing the outcomes from the district, it actively unbalances them. What specifically that means... that depends on... many things, like the relative sizes of the districts and the proportions of people voting for various parties in them. In effect, under usual circumstances, the new system amplifies the strongest party, especially the party strongest in the smallest-population districts, which are usually the rural ones.