It is said that Catherine Helen Spence, in addition to being a stalwart advocate for PR and STV for much of the 1800s in Australia, was also the the person who introduced the idea of districts instead of Thomas Hare's notion of having the country of Britain as one huge at-large district.
And it is said tht she did this in 1861.
In 1861 she did publish a groundbreaking booklet on the need for PR, and STV in particular. But Spence's 1861 booklet Plea for Pure Democracy may not actually be about the need for MMDs.
She is credited with the idea of MMDs, counter to Thomas Hare's proposed Britain-wide STV system.
Her booklet A Plea for Pure Democracy does not indicate MMDs, except in that, multiple members elected in one district may be the outcome of PR. Multi-member districts were already in use in Britain at that time - two-seat districts were common.
see Aug 25, 1899 newspaper article
Hare-Spence voting put forward as way to go in the Commonwealth election
25 Aug 1899 - THE HARE-SPENCE SYSTEM OF VOTING - Trove (nla.gov.au)
for more info
in fact, at-large voting to a degree was her prescribed recipe, not discrete multi-member districts.
1861 Catherine Helen Spence, PR's great Australian champion,
said in 1861
"reformers have applied themselves to endeavour to arrive at a true system of representation by cunning slits in ballot boxes, by equal electoral districts, and by extension of the suffrage, but all without success ; for the principle itself being unjust, the fuller carrying out of it only leads to greater injustice.
The more equally the electoral districts are divided, the more the suffrage is extended, the more people exercise their right of voting, the greater is the power of the numerical majority, and the less chance minorities have of obtaining a hearing. The genius, the originality, the independence of the country find no majority anywhere to appreciate them, and political life is thronged with second and third rate men; who either have no
opinions of their own, or have the art of concealing them." (A Plea for Pure Democracy)
As a replacement for FPTP or Block Voting, Spence put forward a system of STV which is described in the following:
"The provisions necessary to secure equality of representation :
1. That the power shall be given to minorities to escape from the bounds of electoral districts, where they are always defeated in detail, for without that they cannot have their fair share of the representation; therefore, as the State can draw no nice distinctions, every elector shall be at liberty to vote for any candidate who may be nominated for any district in the colony, thus exercising the judgment of each man by widening his choice.
2. That every candidate who can obtain the thirty-sixth part of all the votes given for all the constituencies of South Australia shall be considered duly elected as a member of a House of Assembly consisting of thirty-six members. [Hare quota]
3. That as, if the state of the poll were known as it goes along, no elector would vote for a man who already had obtained sufficient votes to secure his return, it shall be open to him to express on his voting-paper the course he would take in such a contingency, so that the Registrar and Poll-Clerks may carry out his wishes, as they see the position of each candidate disclosed in sorting the voting papers ; so that as a list is sent to a library by a messenger to show what books the subscriber would like, the first being preferred to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth, so the elector shall make a list of say from three to eight* names of men whom he would like to see in Parliament in the order of his preference;
so that if either his first choice can get in without his vote, or is not popular enough to make up the quota required, the elector shall not lose his vote altogether, but fall back upon his second choice;
if [the scond choice] too should be over or under, the third shall be taken, and so on.
The difference [between the library analogy and the election] is this, that if the book is popular, it is pretty sure to be out; if the man is popular, he is sure to be in.
4. That each man's vote shall aid in the return of one member. However long the list may be, the vote is only appropriated to one; as, however long the subscriber's list may be, the messenger only obtains one book.
5. That in appropriating votes of the same rank in the lists, local votes shall be preferred to those out of the district, and the lists which contain few names shall be preferred to those which have many. [I am not sure what she means by this]
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She went on to say that she was interested in feedback abouit the voting system in outline, not the un-important things that people might quibble about:
"From the popular press I demand on this important subject either support or. refutation. If I meet with neither - if the criticisms are confined to remarks on the style of writing, on the outward appearance of my pamphlet - if they deal merely in quibbling details, such as the question whether the member who was returned by a minority of Yatala and a number of outside votes should be called the honourable member for Yatala in Parliamentary speeches or the honourable member for No Man's Land **, leaving unchallenged or unsupported the principles from which I start and the conclusions to which I arrive, I will be constrained to admit that the mischiefs of our present pseudo-democracy have penetrated deeper than I had imagined.
If I am accused of not going into every detail, I can only say that I am not framing an Act of Parliament - I do not understand Parliamentary formulas or proceedings. I am only trying to show the principles on which an Act of Parliament should be framed. But if the press fails me, I fall back upon the people, who are really the masters of the press, and if they are moved, I have no doubt that the press will follow."
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footnotes [her booklet actually has these footnotes]:
* I think eight names would make a needlessly long list; but there is no necessity for a rule to restrict the voter's choice. He may have a pleasure in shewing his good will and marking the names of his favourites, even though it may be useless.
** Even this little matter might be settled by allowing members of the House of Assembly to call each other by their names, as must be done in the Upper House. It is a great inconvenience to ordinary readers to distinguish between the six members for the City, and the three members for the Burra and Clare, and the two members for other districts, and a trouble to the newspapers to have to explain. If we make the Parliament respectable, the language used in it will be respectful. But if we have hit the spirit, we need not care about the form. (p. 21)
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the representation elected under FPTP, no matter how cleverly the districts are arranged, can never be proportional within the district.
The more average and balanced each district is, the less chance of a small party getting lucky.
as she says
"it is quite possible that an opinion held by two-fifths of the people might not command a majority in any particular constituency. ...
Let us suppose that one-third of the voters in South Australia think that Government immigration ought to be resumed, and two-thirds are opposed to it; then there ought to be twelve members returned for the former and twentyfour for the latter. But, according to our present system, the minority might send only four, or six, or fourteen, according to the majority being unequally divided in the eighteen electoral districts. The number returned is no correct criterion of the prevalence of an opinion, for there may be a majority of 146 in one district, and a minority of one single vote in another, which is presumed to balance the first. There has been lately a great excitement on the question of Mr. Justice Boothby's decisions and conduct, and no doubt there is a very large majority who go against the House of Assembly. The feeling was so strong and so general that if there had been a dissolution a week ago and a fresh election, it is probable that in every electoral district all the members who voted for Mr. Duffield's amendment would have lost their seats, and other men put in their places. But the unanimity of the members returned would be no proof of the unanimity of public opinion, for the minority had been defeated in detail in every constituency ; while, if they had their fair share of political power, they might have returned eight of the old members expressly on account of the very vote which had so irritated the majority."
... general result of their being intrusted with supreme and irresponsible power; but any change in our electoral law, which would raise the tone of canvass, would be of the greatest benefit to the colony.
Under the system of equal representation, the candidate can appeal from those who differ from him in his particular district, to those who agree with him all over the colony, and the more bold and candid he shows himself, the better chance he would have of a general constituency. (p. 11)
On local representation, Spence said - "It is the old English idea of borough representation that has given this false notion of the paramount claims of local interests ; people have forgotten that the aim of representation is to represent citizens - not cities." (p. 14)
Her pamphlet gives the vote count process as what looks like the Bucklin method:
"When a voting-paper has contributed to the return of a representative, it is put away as done with, and the name of the returned candidate is cancelled from the remaining voting-papers.
Local votes are preferred to those from other districts, and when it is necessary to choose between votes in the same locality, the list which contains fewest names is preferred . We will suppose that there will be twenty-four candidates who can make up the quota, or more than the quota, offirst votes. This disposes of 12,000 voting-papers, leaving 6,000 from which to select the remaining twelve. First, he must take those voting- papers which contain 500 first and second votes ; then 500, first, second, and third ; then 500 first, second, third, fourth and lower still if necessary." (p. 8)
...
"under the system of equal representation, the candidate can appeal from those who differ from him in his particular district, to those who agree with him all over the colony, and the more bold and candid he shows himself, the better chance he would have of a general constituency." (p. 11)
p. 12/13 she gives example of general shading of opinion.
showing there are more than two sides to important questions.
local representation would be preserved voluntarily by elected member himself or herself:
"Every candidate ought to be prepared to advocate, as far as is consistent with his general principles, the interests of the district for which he has been put in nomination."
her system would be like the STV of NYC's but even more flexible.
any candidate who won quota would be elected
"If it should happen that a district should not have a member, it will be in no worse position than that of Victoria in our present House of Assembly, whose solitary member occupies the post of Speaker."
[2023 Alberta there are several instances where no member currently sits for a district, and the chamber depends on a member elected outside the district to represent those residents. so if it happens under Spence's STV sytem, that no district has a member, it would be due to voters preferring a candidate who ran outside the district, knowing that it could happen that no member would be elected among the local candidates. It is the way most of the voters in the district wanted it.]
problem with local districts used for nomination purposes
"In the United States so great a value is attached to local interests that unless he is a resident in that State. Thus the States generally are often deprived altogether of the services of a man of talent and experience, and an additional element of bitterness and rancour is infused into elections, when the candidate knows that if he is disappointed there he has no recourse elsewhere."
problem with voters forced to vote only for local candidates
"It is quite possible to pay too high a price for a representation exclusively local ; the country loses more when two stupid or two dishonest men are brought into Parliament than the district does by having no local representtive at all." (p. 14/15)
problem with FPTP:
" The numerical majority everywhere carry the day, minorities are completely extinguished, and cannot exercise that wholesome power as a check to tyranny and an educator of the people which I have insisted on in these pages. Class interests reign predominant, and the interest of one class alone is considered.
The payment of members is a temptation to third and fourth-rate men to make political capital by trading in popular cries, and the abuse, clamour, and unfairness of elections, combined with the personalities of newspaper attack, prevent the wise, the noble, and the worthy from offering themselves at all as candidates. Thus the lowering influences act and react upon one another - the people corrupt the press, the press misleads the people. The tendency of a popular press under so-called Democratic institutions is to follow rather than to lead public opinion — to watch the tide and take advantage of it."
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Pending further investigation, I have to state that I believe this may or may not be the case:
that Spence saw that a country-wide election would lose the local touch, so she came up with multi-member distrcits retaining local members but still having good semblance of proportonality in the members elected, by having the districts be multi-member.
maybe, maybe not.
stay tuned...
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