Old Books on PR by Field (a snippet of information)

1871 Journal of Social Science

p. 143 Field Representation of minorities

a majority of members in a legislature can pass laws but the individual members of that slim majority may each be elected by just a minority of votes in their district,

so a minority of voters can control lawmaking.

"This comes of perverting what should be a personal selection into one that that is local and territorial and makes a legislature almost as likely to misrepresent as to represent the will of the people." (p. 134)

...

"What we have to do is to divorce the quota from the district, either by dispensing with the districts altogether, or by enlarging the districts to the limits of several quotas and allowing the ballots to be divided, making the number equal to the quota sufficient in all cases to elect a representative."

A bill for English parliamentary reform, introduced by the Duke of Richmond in the year 1780, contained a clause looking to a representation of local minorities.

...

Preferential Voting (STV)

[Hare's proposal] say 800,000 votes cast and the number of representatives to be chosen 200, so the quota of voters to each rep would be 4,000. 

[then voter casts ranked ballot]

no vote is to be counted for more than one candidate. Any candidate receiving 4,000 votes is to be declared elected. If the candidate first on a voting paper fails to obtain quota, or has already obtained it, the vote descends to the next in order of preference. When a cand. has obtained the quota, his votes up that number are to be counted for the cand. next in order of preference. and so on till all the votes are appropriated an the whole number of reps. is obtained. If there be not 200 persons credited each with 4000 votes and the representative body is consequently deficient in number, the deficiency is to be made up by taking the candidates who come nearest to the required quota.

This method, which we have called that of preferential voting, is also called by the Swiss reformers that of the electoral quotient (le quotient electoral).

A second plan is that of cumulative voting.... [if each voter has ten votes] one tenth of the votes may so be sure of a representative.

limited voting [say with five posts] the minority party [of the two] will certainly elect two of the judges.

substitute voting [Gove plan?] which permits candidates to cast anew the useless votes given to them and substitute a third person in their place. 

proxy voting ... This is the plan put forth three years ago by the Personal Representation Society of New York.

list voting AKA free concurrence of lists or open list 

these methods are not alike in merit. 

"That of preferential voting is theoretically the most perfect and if faithfully executed, would give the best representative chamber. it would compel a certain degree of deliberation before voting, would ensure to two or more parties PR in the legislature, and would ensure a certain degree of non-partisan representation. Whether it would prove as has been predicted, too complicated in its working among a large constituency can hardly be determined before actual experiment....

Preferential voting avoids both the objection of too great concentration of votes upon one person and the loss of votes below the Quota, since no cand. can have counted in his favour more than enough to elect him, and every vote will be counted, except the number less than a quota left after electing all of the required number of candidates.

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The List Plan system was conceived by Thomas Gilpin, a retired paper-mill owner, in a paper he read to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1844: "On the representation of minorities of electors to act with the majority in elected assemblies". It was never put into practical use, but even as late as 1914 it was put forward as a way to elect the U.S. electoral college delegates and for local elections

(Hoag, Effective Voting (1914), p. 31; Swain, Civics for Montana Students, 1912, p. 163)

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This modification was apparently first suggested by H. R. Droop, a London barrister in 1868. Its significance is discussed in Appendix VI (1). THE WORLD MOVEMENT FOR P. R. § 123. The Spread of the List System. It was over forty years after the appearance of Hare's first work before the single transferable vote was used for public elections anywhere outside of Denmark.

Strange as it may seem, the energetic propaganda of Hare and Mill first bore fruit in the adoption and extension of the list forms of P. R. described in Chapter V and Appendix VII. For Hare and Mill were the direct inspiration of the P.R. movement in Switzerland, where the list type of P. ...

(unknown source for this quote)