Proportional Representation A Practical Proposal (1884)
A form of list PR was suggested by British reformer John Westlake, Q.C.
He proposed the system for London England school board elections to allow party list to be used to make fair the Cumulative Voting system being used in those elections.
This proposal is found in a pamphlet entitled Proportional Representation A Practical Proposal (1884).
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t3bz6j72c&view=1up&seq=12 (Hathi Trust online)
The writer credits CV with furnishing "each large school board with representation of all shades of opinion held by a body of numerous electors"
But he said CV suffers from the fact that the majority shifts from election to election, thus producing policy lurch (to use the modern parlance). In London this wasteful lurching was dampened by the emergence of many independent candidates who found the support they were seeking and were elected.
Westlake though said that a weakness of CV was very apparent - voting groups were not represented proportionally - a voting group that runs more candidates than its proportion of the vote risks electing fewer members than in proportion to its votes.
And out of fear of that happening, parties often were running fewer candidates than their numbers of votes. And even when the correct number of candidates is run, a party might elect fewer than its proportional due because the votes of their supporters were not evenly divided among them.
"The wasteful accumulation of votes on some candidates leads to the election of some members by a very small number of votes."
"It is desirable that each shade of opinion held by a numerous body of electors should be represented but it is not desirable that very small bodies of electors should have the power of returning candidates.... I leave it to everyone's knowledge of human nature to be proof that among the elections made by too few votes, many must be such as he would regret."
When reading what Westlake proposed remember that he was putting his quota/slate system on to an already-existing Cumulative Voting system, where each voter could cast multiple votes and those votes could be allocated however the voter wanted among various recipients or just put on one.
Under his sytems as under CV, voters did not mark back-up preferences.
Each voter actually had multiple votes but could lump them all on one candidate.
Voters had the choice of voting for individual(s) or party slate(s).
Westlake proposed establishing a quota (the Droop quota) and that each candidate would run as part of a slate. Each voter would have the right to place any or all of his votes on a party slate or on any individual candidate(s).
Votes would be counted.
Votes placed on a party slate would be first placed on the slate candidate with the most individual votes.
If the slate's leading candidate passed quota, the surplus votes were moved on to the next-most-popular candidate on that slate, and so on.
When no candidate on a slate has surplus votes, if the slate's votes are spread across multiple remaining candidates, the votes of the least popular slate candidate shall be attributed to the next lower candidate to make up quota if possible. If not, eliminations and transfers continue until only one candidate remains on the slate.
At the end when open seats still remain and no more than one candidate remains on each slate, the candidates shall be "declared elected to whom the largest number of votes have been given or attributed."
The quota was set at such a level that no more can achieve quota than the number of seats to be filled.
If this seems complicated, Westlake assures the reader that "all the operations necessary for bringing out the result of the election will be arithmetical ones, performed, after the counting, on the numbers of votes given for the several slates and candidates." Voters would not be involved and no higher math such as multipication would be required.
Westlake called it "combining free list with the cumulative vote," sort of half party list, half STV.
It varies from STV in that votes would have been transferred just in line with slates. Transfer across slates (party lines) might save votes for later use but that is not permitted in this system. Votes left as "partial quotas" in a party slate might not have been wasted though - the last seats (sometimes) would have been filled by relative plurality - quota not required.
The "attribution" (elimination-transfer) mechanism is similar to the Gove system. But in Gove the recipient candidate directed the flow of votes, or preset a list of where transfer could go with the transfer going just to the one already with the most votes. This last variant is very similar to Westlake's proposal, except that under the Gove system, votes could cross party lines.
I don't know if Westlake's proposal was ever used. But the intent of his "free list" is very close to the intent of open-list list PR.
Systems such as Westlake's tried to allow votes to be transferred (which ensured high rate of effective votes) and to allow voters to direct first-preference votes to individual candidates, and also aimed to secure proportional representation based along slate/party lines.
But already by the 1890s, closed-list list PR and STV were growing in popularity. and Tasmania used STV to elect some of its state legislators starting a small wave of adoptions of STV in cities and low-level legislative chambers across the British Commonweatlh and the U.S. Belgium adopted list PR in national elections around 1900.
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