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Tom Monto

Timeline of Electoral Reform -- explanatory notes

Updated: Feb 20


These explanatory notes relate to the blog "Timeline of Electoral Reform":


Table of contents for items below:

Britain's use of MMDs (relating to 1867 item)

Description of STV (and the low impact of vote transfers)

Evolution of STV

Variety of methods used in STV to transfer surplus votes

Australia's switch to STV

Borda Count (relates to an item in the year 2000)


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Britain's use of MMDs (relating to 1867 item)

Britain has a long tradition of using multi-member ridings - rather than single-member riding - for elections to the House of Commons; the widespread use of the latter is a relatively recent development.

The transition to single-member constituencies in the 19th Century had little to do with democratic notions of "one vote, one value" as this was incompatible with the widely held belief that parliament represented places rather than people. Only very slowly, and with the greatest of reluctance, was it accepted that larger places deserved more seats than smaller places. There was widespread opposition to single-member constituencies when these became the norm under the terms of the Third Reform Act of 1884-5. The political elite came to accept single-member constituencies as a less than satisfactory solution to the problem of how to ensure that propertied interests would not be swamped by "the masses."

Subsequent reform acts have done little to alter the basically conservative character of the electoral system introduced in 1884-85 - the view that parliament ultimately represents places rather than people has endured. Single-member constituencies were the product of a specific historical development: the transition to mass politics in late-Victorian Britain. The continued attachment to them is outdated and sentimental, and constitutes one of the major barriers to reforming the current electoral system. ...

from the 13th Century down to the late 19th Century, multi-member constituencies were the norm for parliamentary elections in the UK. It was not until 1948 that the last of the multi-member seats were swept away.


The turning point was the Third Reform Act of 1884-5. Before 1885 70 percent of MPs sat for multi-member constituencies; after this Act only 8 percent [54 out of 670] did so....


In 1867, Limited Voting was brought into use in the three-seat districts, and in the City of London riding and other four-seat districts as well. Starting in 1918, STV was used to fill the ten or so University seats. Otherwise Block Voting was used in the MMDs.


For more info, see the Montopedia blog


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Description of STV


STV is a family of systems. The systems are distinguished by differences based on several  characteristics. Different STV-type systems were considered or used at different times in the past, and several different types are in use today in various places.


STV systems all share these attributes:

Single voting in MMDs or at-large

-A vote is cast for an individual candidate, not a party slate (voting is by secret ballot)

-if districts used, votes do not leave the districts where they are cast.

-First preference is marked on each ballot

-Back-up preferences may be marked on each ballot. This is required under some STV systems; in others it is optional. 

-Transfers of surplus votes if  required

-Transfers of votes of un-electable candidates if required.

-Transfers may be across party lines. (The lower rankings on a ballot are never used to transfer the ballot unless the first preference has been used to elect the candidate or the candidate indicated as the first preference has been declared un-electable. so back-up preferences can never be used against the first preference.)

-At end, if field of candidates in the district or at-large are thinned to the number of remaining open seats, the remaining candidates are declared elected even if they do not have quota.


Due to these basic mechanics, the members elected under the most-sophisticated STV system and those under the least-sophisticated methods are mostly the same -- in most cases the elected members are those who are in winning positions in the first count, before any transfers are conducted.

(This observation is backed up by the recent scholarly essay "The transfers game" A comparative analysis of the mechanical effect of lower preference votes in STV systems (sagepub.com) by Stephen Quinlan (International Political Science Review 43 (2022) 1)

Quinlan stes that under STV, on average, transfers are pivotal in the election of only about one in 10 elected candidates. Hence, their impact is the exception rather than the norm....")


Specific STV methods vary in:

A. how surplus votes are transferred,

B. what is quota - Droop or Hare

C.  districting -- at-large or districts (and DM of districts if used, and DM if at-large contest is used.


A and B relate to the mechanics of STV used. (historical development of the method used to transfer surpluses are discussed in "Evolution of STV" below)


C is important as it indicates the party proportionality that might be expected, if it is judged by first preferences marked, and also if final votes are used as base of measuring PP. In the first case, the higher the DM, the more proportional result due to votes not needing to cross party lines to be used. In both cases,  the higher the DM, the more proportional result due to fewer votes making up a fractional quota in each district that are not used to elect anyone. the higher the DM, the smaller the quota. The quota is both the amount certian to bring election, and sets the ceiling (more or less) on the amount that is not used to elect anyone in each district.


Systems vary in how many back-up preferences the voter must mark on the ballot. This is important for the voter to know when casting ballot but may or may not reduce the existence of exhausted ballots. Some ballots are never transferred so whether they have back-up preferences or not is not even noticed. Even where full marking is required, in  some systems a vote may be used up to the point that the mistake or omission becomes a factor. In others incomplete ranking is cause for the vote to be rejected outright. 

Most election system designers seek to put as little a burden on the voter as possible so full-preferential ranking systems are not often the choice. What full-preferential voting gains in accuracy and in the rate of effective votes among valid votes may be offset by a larger number of rejected votes. Equivalent rationale for either rule can be found and fairness is not necessarily greater under either case. So I do not delve into this.


Ties and by-elections are treated differently in different systems but those are minor questions that I do not delve into. 

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The "Evolution of STV" timeline below shows how increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed, each considered an improvement over previous models.


Fairness (in many ways), secrecy and lack of random-ness have been progressively achieved under more sophisticated systems. These increasing sophistications were applied in elections or merely considered, sometimes in response to criticism (often unfounded) of the old system sometimes when  it was really the basic concept of PR that was being disputed, or due to the natural human striving for more perfect methodology.


Party-proportionality of results under STV should not be measured against first preferences marked on the ballots. STV is not meant to be a party-proportional system necessarily. A vote may be transferred across party lines and may be used to elect a member of a different party than the voter's first preference. Transfers may produce the election of someone who was not in winning position in the first count. In many cases, the leading person in winning position who is "deposed" is replaced by a candidate of the same party so the change does not change the party proportionality produced, but the election of the new candidate does satisfy more voters than the original ordering of candidates.


STV's goal is to ensure that most votes are actually used to elect someone and each of those elected candidates are elected by same number of votes. Under some systems or by plurality at the end, which is the most fair that can be done in that situation. With such a mechanism, most votes see their vote used to elect someone that they prefer over others, a variety of parties are represented, a party with majority support takes a majority of seats, small parties take their due share of seat or their supporters may be able to assist in election of a candidate of a larger party that the voter also prefer.

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Evolution of STV

(Some of the information here is taken from the article "Evolution of STV PR" on the website of the Proportional Representation Foundation.)


Background

 in early 1800s, Britain and many other places elected their politicians by single-winner FPTP (what is called single-member plurality) or by block voting (where voter could cast as many votes as the number of seats to fill.) Districts used were often two-seat districts, but they sometimes had more seats than that. (More on Britain's MMD in footnote above)


When only two candidates or two party slates were competing in the district, the majority of voters saw their choice elected.

As soon as a third party or an independent candidate ran in a district, the potential was for vote-splitting and for the majority to be split among two, while another party took most of the seats or all of them with only a minority of the votes.

The election of minority winners in a districts repeated in a great number of districts across the land, often results in a false-majority governments where the government in power (majority of sets) is elected with support of only a minority of voters.


in cases where a party slate with minority of votes took all the seats in a multiple-member district, the waste of votes and hence the un-fairness struck some scholars of the political scene, and various solutions were found.


1819: Thomas Wright Hill

In 1819, Thomas Wright Hill published a descripton of a system for electing a committee of The Birmingham (England) Society for Literacy and Scientific Improvement. The system was designed to produce both majority and minority representation on the committee. Each voter cast a ballot for one candidate, with the ballot also identifying the voter. The votes were counted, and any candidate who received five or more votes was elected. If a candidate received more than five votes, excess ballots were selected at random from among the votes cast for the candidate, and the voter identified on the ballot was invited to transfer his vote for a different candidate. If seats still unfilled and there were no surplus votes to transfer, voters whose ballots were cast for unelected candidates were invited to vote again. The process repeated until all the empty seats were filled, or until there were fewer than five left-over ballots (neither used for election of a member nor exhausted), when the most popular of the remaining candidates were declared elected to fill the seats, whether they had quota or not.


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1840 Adelaide city election -- Two elected by quorum

Rowland Hill, son of Thomas Wright Hill (see 1819), was a colonial official in South Australia. He was successful in getting the first city election of Adelaide to be held according to STV-style methods.

(not STV because no ranked voting and no transfers)

Hare quota used to set the quorum

at-large in the city.

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A problem with Thomas Hill’s system and with the quorum system is that later voters have an advantage over earlier voters, in that they can use their vote to elect a second or third choice if, by the time they vote, their earlier choices have already been elected.


Marked preferences on ballots prevent this "free riding" and also allow secret voting.

Carl Andrae in Denmark and Thomas Hare in Britain put forward STV-style systems that used ranked ballots.

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1856: Carl Andrae

In 1856, Danish mathematician and politician Carl Andrae (who was unaware of the Hills’ systems) introduced the idea of a ranked ballot. The ballots were counted in random order for the first choice on each ballot that had not yet been elected. After quota was reached, vote were re-directed according to the next usable back-up preference.

The system saw limited use in Denmark until 1915, then Denamkr switched to form of mixed member PR.

Unlike STV, Andrae’s system did not allow for the reallocation of ballots cast for un-electable candidates. 

Ranked ballots solve the free riding, in that voters make their selection without knowing how others vote.

method used to transfer surplus votes was fully random so un-scientific that way.

at-large or district unknown


1857 Thomas Hare

Thomas Hare published PR Machinery of Representation. In it he called for Single Voting in a multi-member at-large district (one covering all of the UK) with a method of transferring votes, intended to prevent waste of votes through surplus votes being left with successful candidates.

Soon, he made preferential voting (ballots bearing first prefernces and back-up preferences) part of his system. The bones of his system are the basis of the family of STV systems in use today – although the systems used today vary in some ways from Hare’s concept.


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How later systems vary from Hare's concept

For elections of government bodies larger than cities (and even in some city elections) usually separate multiple-member districts are now used, to guarantee representation of local areas.


Mostly the Hare quota (one-ninth of the electorate in a nine-seat district, for example) has been replaced by the equally-effective Droop quota (slightly more than one-tenth of the electorate in a nine-seat district, for example).


The transfers conducted under STV may be done in a strictly random manner – by taking a number of ballots equal to the surplus at random from the ballots of the successful candidate and transferring the votes to the next available preference shown on the ballot (that is, to candidates who have not already been elected or excluded).


But even in Hare’s time, mathematical calculation of the transfers was envisioned, using just the next usable preferences marked on all or some of the votes held by the successful candidate. Hare in his early writings prescribed the whole-vote "exact method" for transfer of surplus votes (according to Humphreys, PR (1911), p. 141).

(Later, a more exact method using all the preferences marked on some or all of the ballots held by the successful candidate was invented – see 1880.)

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1861 Catherine Helen Spence  A Plea for Pure Democracy

(the STV system she put forward is described in the main PR timeline)

Under her system, votes would be potentially transferred from a candidate in one district to a candidate in another district. This would have obliviated much of the need for votes to cross party lines as happens in STV, when the last remaining candidate of a party is eliminated or elected for the vote to go anywhere it must cross party lines.

she addressed the at-large versus district question by saying her system would use multi-member districts but vote would not be constrained within the district.

quota Hare

districts to be used. (perhaps simply because multi-member district were already in use, if they were), In her system, district boundaries were to be porous.


1865: Thomas Hare

 In his 1865 book, The election of representatives parliamentary and municipal: a treatise, he added the idea of successively eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes and transferring those ballots to the next (unelected and uneliminated) candidate on the ballot. 

This was the first system to include the fundamental elements of all future STV systems: ranked ballots with transfers of both surplus votes of elected candidates and transfers from eliminated candidates.

His system envisioned all of Britain's seats being contested in one huge contest.

and of course the Hare quota was used in Hare's system.


Hare’s system had surplus ballots picked at random for the transfer. There is no certainty that the ballots chosen randomly reflect the make-up of the votes held by the successful candidate, even as to next marked preference.

(later a proportion-based method of transferring surplus votes was invented. The "Exact Method" transfers votes in true proportion to the next usable marked preference but does not consider any lower preferences.

All STV systems that transfer only whole votes do not consider lower back-up preferences so may produce result that do not reflect votes cast, if a later transfer has to use the lower preferences marked on the ballots that had been transferred just according to a higher preference marked on it.


1868: Henry Droop

As of 1868, all STV-style systems discussed were to use the Hare quota. Quota was arrived at by the number of voters divided by the number of seats to be filled, with any remainder ignored. This is the largest number that allows there to be enough votes to fill enough quotas to fill all the seats.

Henry Droop argued that a lower threshold, the number of voters divided by one more than the number of seats to be filled, rounded up, is better. It does not mean that too many people would be elected to fill the available seats, and has several advantages over the Hare quota. These advantages are such that virtually all STV systems today use some version of the Droop quota. 

The Droop, being smaller than Hare, produces more proportional results. A candidate might have enough votes to get a seat under Droop but not under Hare. As about one quota is often un-used in each district, Droop means fewer votes wasted that way than if Hare is used.


Hare’s system, with the Droop quota, is essentially the system that Cambridge, Massachusetts has used for city elections since 1940.

 at-large city election, random whole-vote surplus vote transfers, Droop quota.


1880: J.B. Gregory

The methods we’ve discussed so far choose surplus ballots at random to distribute to lower-choice candidates.

A question of fairness arises, since the ballots chosen to be transferred as surplus have more power than other votes. A voter might see his first preference elected and then have the vote go on to help elect another member, while another vote cast for the same first preference stays behind with the elected member. 

(But note that under STV, in the end, each vote is counted just once to elect a member.)


J.B. Gregory proposed an improvement in which, instead of choosing for transfers just some of the ballots held (or set to be received) by the elected candidate, all the ballots are transferred to the next choice. This is to be done by counting those ballots at a reduced weight. (Gregory actually gave each ballot an initial weight of 100 and then used whole-vote counting, but the effect is the same as transferring hundredths of votes.) 

In this way, every voter contributing to a surplus has a voice in how the surplus is distributed. 

As well, in striving for better proportionality and reducing risk of random results, the Gregory system as used today includes consideration of all the marked back-up preference on each ballot so that ballots are grouped based on both the nexrt usable preference and any lower preferences that will be piggy-backed with the transfer, so that the transfers are proportional as well.


There are variations on the Gregory method.

As Gregory originally envisioned it, transfers of surplus would merely consider the last parcel of votes received by the successful candidate and use them to compose the transfer of surplus votes.

This was thought to be prone to unbalance as the the parcel may not reflect the true variety of preferences marked on the votes held by the candidate so Inclusive Gregory was invented where all the votes held by the candidate are considered for the formulation of the transfer.

Under the Weighted Inclusive Gregory method, all votes are counted and assigned to other candidates still in the count according to the voters’ preferences, but the ballots are given separate transfer values depending on their history (that is, whether they have been or have not been transferred before).


The variation known as the “Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method” (WIGM) is the most widespread of STV systems today, and is used by Scotland local authorities and in some states in Australia. [Farrell and McAllister. p. 60 say the Inclusive Gregory Method is used in Senate, South Aus., Western Aus and Victoria] The BC Citizens Assembly of 2017? recommended WIGM for use in British Columbia provincial elections but the ensuing referendum saw a majority vote against its use.


Other innovations of the surplus transfer methods have been invented since the 1970s. They use fractions of votes and this leads to intricate math, and overall they seem to me to be more intricate than they are worth.


One analysis reports that  "they tend not to differ much in their results."

This statement matches with the observation that under any STV system, most of those in winning positions in the first count go on to be elected, no matter how surplus transfers are done.


The whole-vote method - sometimes called the "Exact Method" - has been used in Ireland and Malta elections for the last hundred years. Respectable party proportionality and a high rate of effective votes has been secured under that STV system without the use of fractional transfers, much of the time without the use of computers.

The Inclusive Gregory Method may be used instead if one wants to completely eliminate any possibility of disproportional results due to the lower preference piggybacked in the whole-vote method.

WIGM ensures that each voter has exactly one vote per person.

Methods of transfer of surplus votes more intricate than that have been invented (such as Meeks). But their use seems to me to be un-necessary. Few of the seats are determined by transfers, and even fewer are determined by transfers of surplus votes. In 188 seats filled during the use of STV in provincial elections in Alberta and Mantioba, only about 30 were set by transfers, (in all other cases the elected candidate had been in a winning position in the first count) and some of these changes were between candidates of the same party.

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Variety of methods used in STV to transfer surplus votes

see the Montopedia blog "Transferring surplus votes..."


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see

for info on how each country adopted PR -- whether it was by multi-party agreement, imposed by one party (only Costa Rica), or by referendum (only Switzerland and NZ).

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Australia's switch to STV (relates to 1897, 1978 items)


Federal upper house (Senate) adopted STV in 1949.

used whole-vote method of transferring surplus votes (likely "exact method") from 1949 to 1984

1984 switched to Inclusive-Gregory Method system.

(IGM is flawed but Senate refuses to change to WIGM - see James Gilmour's Review of some aspects the Single Transferable Voting system for local elections in Wales)


Of Australia's six states and two territories, four (South Aus., West Aus., NSW, Victoria) use STV for election of members of their upper house. One uses Alternative Voting (IRV). (Three are unicameral so have no upper house.)

Of Australia's six states and two territories, two (Tasmania and ACT) use STV for election of members of their lower house. The rest use Alternative Voting (IRV).

(Only Queensland and Northern Territory do not use STV at all.)


Tasmania adopted STV to elect all members of lower house in 1907. DM-5. Since 1909, (simple) Gregory Method was used for transfer of surplus votes. transfer value arrived at by dividing the surplus by the total number of votes in last parcel transferred to the candidate. for transfers, whole votes used, fractional remainders were not recorded (actually were, in a separate total named "votes lost by omitting fractional remainders")

(STV previously used to elect some members from 1897 to 1901. Farrell and McAllister, The Aus. Electoral System say whole-vote method ("exact method"?) was used 1897-1901) (see 1907)


NSW legislative council adopted STV in 1978. (prior to that, it elected state Senators by STV indirectly.) first 15, then 21 elected through STV at a time, in state-wide at-large contests. Whole-vote method used for transfers of surplus votes. (Farrell and McAllister, The Aus. Electoral System, p. 62)

(Lower house used STV in 1918)


South Australia upper house adopted STV in 1981. DM-11*

Western Australia upper house adopted STV in 1981 (1987?). DM 5-7*

2022 WA shifted to at-large district where 37-member Leg. Council are to be elected in one contest. (when this first put into effect in 2025, it will be largest DM under STV ever)


(Victoria's first STV first municipal election, for a restructured City of Richmond, in 1988)


Australian Capital Territory lower house adopted STV in 1995. DM 5-7 (Inclusive-Gregory Method system)

Victoria upper house adopted STV in 2003. DM-5*


* simple GM operates same as Inclusive-Gregory Method system for first transfer of surplus votes, surplus votes belonging to candidates elected in the first Count. Thereafter they use Gregory Method just based on last parcel received by the elected candidate. (Farrell and McAllister, The Aus. Electoral System, p. 63)


(as well, a particular form of STV is used municipally but due to the group ticket voting option on the ballot, performs as a sort of quasi party list system. We see that in the systems used in the City of Melbourne and for NSW local government, which employ the above-the-line and below-the-line device.)


for more information see

Narelle Miragliotta, Determining the Result: Transferring Surplus Votes in the Western

Australian Legislative Council (Perth: Western Australian Electoral Commission, 2002)


Ireland and Malta adopted national STV around 1920. Neither are federations so government elections held only at national and municipal levels. Both use STV for municipal elections.


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An Australian STV PR organization said this of difference between STV and list PR:

Party List systems - which are party-based, and thus also include the party proportional component of hybrid systems such as New Zealand's Mixed Member Proportional system, and Japan's Supplementary Member system - have no provision for transfer of votes that are surplus to or do not contribute to a quota.

They are not essentially based on the vital principle of direct election of individual candidates, even though those candidates might be incidentally classified in some mutually agreed grouping,

and are systems in which voters are either not able (closed party lists), or are partly or wholly able (open party lists), to cast their votes for individual candidates,

but only to contribute to a possible re-arrangement of their order in a list, and not to have their vote, or various parts of its value, transferred to another candidate, either in their most preferred list, or another list.

This grouping might be "proportional" but - because voters do not fully control their representation - its claim to being a system of "representation" is very much weaker than that of PR-STV.

The Proportional Representation Society of Australia advocates using Single Transferable Vote PR systems, which is the broad basis of the system that Victoria's Local Government Act 1989 prescribes for elections in multi-councillor electoral districts. It opposes the use of party list systems, or even quasi party list systems, such as those now used for the City of Melbourne and for NSW local government, which employ the above-the-line and below-the-line device imposed on the Senate electoral system until 2016. The PRSA seeks to have direct election of all councillors prescribed, without any Group Voting Tickets or other party-based device, as applies for all Tasmanian and South Australian local government elections.

 

Party list systems were originally implemented when the South Australian Legislative Council and the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly first used PR, but in both cases public opinion rejected them and their inescapable character of placing the real power of deciding the people to be elected in the hands of political parties, which alone decide who will be on the lists, and the order they will appear on them, so they were replaced by PR-STV (quota-preferential) systems [that do not have the group ticket voting option].

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New Zealand's 2011 referendum on ending MMP

in choice of MMP versus change, 58 percent wanted MMP continued,

only 42 percent wanted change

if change was necessary, 

47 percent wanted FPTP

24 percent IRV

17 percent STV

13 percent Parallel Voting

(some members elected through FPTP; some through party list PR)

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Borda Count (relates to an item in the year 2000)

Sometimes both first and lower preferences are considered together with some weighed more than others. Under the Borda Count, voters rank all of the candidates on the ballot paper using numbers (1 being highest priority). A candidate is awarded the most points (equal to the number of candidates on the ballot paper) when a voter ranks them first. The candidate with the most points wins. This system is used in Slovenia.

(Unlike in STV, lower preferences are used against first preferences.

Under the Borda Count, rankings mean different weightings of preferences;

in STV, rankings are used in succession where required to transfer votes


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