Abolishing the 5% threshold in MMP (as I advocate) doesn’t mean that a party getting just one vote picks up one in 120 seats. It’s fairly intuitive that there is still an “effective threshold”: a number of votes that parties must get to earn their first seat. That then begs the question: How many votes is enough?
The answer depends on the method used to translate the party vote to seats in Parliament. New Zealand (and a number of other countries) uses a method called the Sainte-Laguë method. Another common method is the d’Hondt method. In this post I’ll assume you’re familiar with at least one of them (they are very similar); if you’re not, Wikipedia explains them reasonably well.
The Sainte-Laguë method is more sympathetic to smaller parties than the d’Hondt method, so we expect the Sainte-Laguë effective threshold to be lower. The report of the 1986…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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