History and Use of The Single Transferable Vote - Early History

Early History

The concept of transferable voting was first proposed by Thomas Wright Hill in 1819. The system remained unused in public elections until 1855, when Carl Andræ proposed a transferable vote system for elections in Denmark. Andræ's system was used in 1856 to elect the Danish Rigsdag, and by 1866 it was also adapted for indirect elections to the second chamber, the Landsting, until 1915.(Why?)

Although he was not the first to propose a system of transferable votes, the English barrister Thomas Hare is generally credited with the conception of Single Transferable Voting, and he may have independently developed the idea in 1857. Hare's view was that STV should be a means of "making the exercise of the suffrage a step in the elevation of the individual character, whether it be found in the majority or the minority." In Hare's original STV system, he further proposed that electors should have the opportunity of discovering which candidate their vote had ultimately counted for, to improve their personal connection with voting.

The noted political essayist, John Stuart Mill, was a friend of Hare and an early proponent of STV, praising it in his essay "On Representation." His contemporary, Walter Bagehot, also praised the Hare system for allowing everyone to elect an MP, even ideological minorities, but also added that the Hare system would create more problems than it solved: " is inconsistent with the extrinsic independence as well as the inherent moderation of a Parliament - two of the conditions we have seen, are essential to the bare possibility of parliamentary government."

STV spread through the British Empire, leading it to be sometimes known as British Proportional Representation. In 1896, Andrew Inglis Clark was successful in persuading the Tasmanian House of Assembly to adopt what became known as the Hare-Clark system, named after himself and Thomas Hare.

In the 20th century, many refinements were made to Hare's original system, by scholars such as Droop, Meek, Warren and Tideman (see: Counting Single Transferable Votes for further details).