strategic reaction by the military regime to the defeat of General Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 Plebiscite since the system was formally established during the period between the plebiscite and the first postauthoritarian elections in 1989. This theory, however, offers a mistaken account of the history and evolution of the binominal election system whose origins are considerably more complex than the conventional wisdom suggests. This article explores the internal political processes and the ideology that led the military government to adopt the binominal system. It argues that the election system was the capstone of the authoritarian institutional framework designed by the military government to protect the 1980 Constitution from efforts by the Concertación to reform it. Contrary to popular belief, the binominal system was proposed long before the 1988 Plebiscite by Arturo Marín Vicuña, then secretary of a government commission studying a new electoral law. This article maintains that, more than any other factor, the binominal system reflects and responds to an interpretation of Chilean political history between 1960 and 1973 that was widely shared among the Pinochet government's legal advisors