[EM] Fw: Roots of STV and Proxy Delegation

[Jonathan Lundell]

On May 5, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Terry Bouricius wrote:

> The first inventor of STV apparently (though with repeat voting rather
> than ranked ballots) was Thomas Wright Hill. He devised the election
> system used by the Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement in
> 1821. The overlap between STV and Proxy Voting is apparent in this quote
> from those bylaws...

I obtained a scan of the bylaws from David Hill, a descendent of Thomas Wright who you might recognize from work he's done with STV. I've linked a copy of it to the Wikipedia article on TWH:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2c/Thomas_wright_hill_laws_1819.pdf

I've also retyped the voting rule itself in the main article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wright_Hill#Hill_and_the_Single_Transferable_Vote

The use of repeat voting is somewhat limited; only (randomly selected) surplus votes are changed in later rounds.

Also of interest is the use of a fixed quota (5) rather than a fixed number of seats.

As you see from this timeline <http://prfound.org/index.php/resources/timeline/>, TWH's idea significantly predates other (known) uses of STV, though I'm not aware of any evidence that his ideas influenced its later development.

The method is pedagogically useful in describing the underlying concept of STV; it's particularly easy to "get".