Proportional Representation — Hare Plan or the Single Transferable Vote and the List System

India does not elect its President the same way it elects its MPs. There is no single constituency where the largest number of voters simply wins. Instead, a formula decides exactly how many first-choice votes a candidate needs, and any votes beyond that number quietly flow on to someone else's second choice. That formula is what this topic is about.

In two minutes

Proportional representation is a family of electoral methods designed to make a party or group's share of seats match its share of votes as closely as possible, and the two main techniques covered here are the Hare Plan (the Single Transferable Vote, using a quota and transferred preferences in multi-member constituencies) and the List System (where parties present ranked lists and seats are allocated to each list in proportion to its vote share).

The rest of this chapter

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