VICTOR D'HONDT, THE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Victor D'Hondt, the Belgian lawyer and jurist, well-known by his method for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections.

Victor Joseph Auguste D'Hondt (20 November 1841-30 May 1901) was a Belgian lawyer and jurist of civil law at Ghent University.

He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections.

The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, Israel, Japan, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, Uruguay and Wales. A modified D'Hondt system is used for elections to the London Assembly and the Scottish Parliament.

Victor D'Hondt was an influential proponent of proportional representation in Belgium. He published several articles on proportional representation and was founding member of the Association Réformiste Belge pour l'Adoption de la Representation Proportionnelle in 1881. From 1885 he served as professor of civil and fiscal law at the University of Ghent. In 1896 he was awarded the title Officer in the Belgian Order of Leopold.

Party-list proportional representation (list-PR) is a subset of proportional representation electoral systems in which multiple candidates are elected through their position on an electoral list. They can also be used as part of mixed-member electoral systems.

In these systems, parties make lists of candidates to be elected, and seats are distributed by elections authorities to each party in proportion to the number of votes the party receives. Voters may vote for the party, as in Spain, Turkey, and Israel; or for candidates whose vote total will pool to the parties, as in Finland, Brazil and the Netherlands; or a choice between the last two ways stated: panachage.

In most party list systems, a voter may only vote for one party (single choice ballot) with their list vote, although ranked ballots may also be used (spare vote). Open list systems may allow more than one preference votes within a party list (votes for candidates are called preference votes -not to be confused with the other meaning of preferential voting as in ranked-choice voting). Some systems allow for voters to vote for candidates on multiple lists, this is called panachage.

More information: Northern Ireland Assembly

In my view what you can't argue for is a system
that is neither decisive nor proportional
and can be indecisive and disproportionate
at the same time.

William Hague