The Assembly decided to retain in principle the electoral districts that had served in their own election; the only modifications to be made were those necessitated by very grave imperfections of the distribution. Having rejected a new distribution of districts, the Assembly had also logically to reject the institution of “tickets of groups of districts” as a substitute for district tickets; it thus came back to the system of Project A--fixed districts for all parties and the assigning of fractions to a ticket for the Reich. This ticket for the Reich, therefore, would have been presented if there had not been brought forward some modifications of the principle because of grave inconveniences. Foremost of these was the following objection: In trying to apportion the votes cast by the electors for the National Assembly according to the mechanism provided by Project A, it was seen that 18 per cent of the members of the Reichstag, that is nearly one-fifth, would be elected on the ticket for the Reich and it was estimated that such a result in the elections of future Reichstags would be but little compatible with the constitutional principle of the direct vote. It was decided in rejecting “group-of-districts tickets” to create, nevertheless, groups of districts. Political parties could declare in advance that they would “unite” within these groups the whole or parts of their district tickets, in such manner that the votes cast for these tickets and remaining unutilized would be assigned to the district tickets receiving the largest number of votes. It would not be until this second redistribution that the fractions would be transferred to the ticket for the Reich. The object was to avoid the possibility that by assigning fractions to “joined” tickets and to the ticket for the Reich, the big political parties would be thereby risking loss to the advantage of small groups of electors which could not assemble within any district an appreciable number of votes. For this reason the following double distribution was adopted. No party will be entitled to a seat by “joining” its district tickets unless one of its tickets has obtained at least 30,000 votes (half of the number necessary to elect a member). No party will be assigned on the ticket for the Reich a larger number of members of the Reichstag than had been elected for that party in the districts on the district tickets. II.--THE ELECTORATE AND ELIGIBILITY. In principle every German twenty years old is an elector, without distinction of sex.