History and use of the single transferable vote
STV has been used in many different local, regional and national electoral systems, as well as in various other types of bodies, around the world.
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 late 1800s and 20th century, refinements were made to Hare's original system, by Droop, Meek, Warren, Tideman and others.
The systems require voters to rank several, or all, of the candidates on the ballot, reducing or eliminating the possibility of exhausted votes.
On the ballot, candidates' names are placed within the column for each party and are randomised by Robson Rotation rather than alphabetical.
[5][6] 2 or 4 per district 1949, 1953 Other cities that used STV include Vancouver, Victoria, Nelson, Port Coquitlam, New Westminster, Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, North Battleford, St. Boniface and Lethbridge (1928 only).
[10][11] Many British Columbia (BC) cities used multi-member at-large districts for their municipal elections at one point, including Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster and Nelson.
The change-back benefited the government party by creating large numbers of wasted votes and a wide possibility for gerrymandering.
Further electoral reform was discussed in the 1990s, particularly after the CCF, now the British Columbia New Democratic Party (BC NDP), was re-elected for a second time that decade in the 1996 election.
However, this did not give it the 60% province-wide support set as a requirement by the Liberal government for the referendum outcome to be automatically binding.
Due to the evident support for electoral reform, the re-elected BC Liberal government announced in the Throne Speech on September 12, 2005, that the public of British Columbia would get a second referendum on STV in November 2008.
STV was not, however, Taagepera's own preference, but was rather the result of a consensus driven by Peet Kask between the outgoing Communist local officials, who sought a system that favored their popular names over their unpopular party brand, and the principle of proportional representation favored by the new parties.
[24] However, just before the Constitution of Estonia was enacted in 1992, a new electoral law was passed on 20 April 1992[23] for the recreated Riigikogu, choosing instead an open party list proportional representation system with a 5% threshold, similar to many other countries of continental Europe.
The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network cites the "complex intricacies of an STV count" as one of the reasons for the change.
In addition, the federal president and vice-president are indirectly elected by MPs using alternative vote, which is STV applied to one vacancy at a time.
Because of the transfer behaviour of the voters, each party can stand many more candidates than there are winners in total without being adversely affected.
This left the unfortunate impression among voters that STV was little more than a gratuitously complex equivalent to existing voting mechanisms.
Electronic voting was trialled in some constituencies in the 2002 election, but discontinued due to concerns about the lack of an audit trail.
5. c. xxiii), a local act of Parliament sponsored by the corporation after representations from a mainly-Protestant group of leading ratepayers.
The 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State mandated proportional representation,[52] and STV was specified in statute law.
[54] Two attempts were made by Fianna Fáil governments to abolish STV and replace it with the first past the post plurality system.
This attempt backfired, however, in the 1977 general election when a larger than expected vote-swing caused a tipping effect resulting in disproportionate losses for the government.
From 1941 to 1965, the city councils of Cork, Limerick and Waterford were each elected in a single local electoral area (LEA), returning 21,[55] 17,[n 6] and 15[58] councillors respectively.
[59] Electoral law empowered the minister for local government to split county boroughs into multiple LEAs only if the council requested; these councils did not do so, as a majority of councillors were independents or from small parties and feared that smaller LEAs would favour the large parties.
In 1917, the Speaker's Conference in the United Kingdom advocated the adoption of STV for 211 of the 569 constituencies in the UK, and instant-runoff voting for the rest, and the Representation of the People Bill was introduced in Parliament that year.
However STV was reintroduced there after the imposition of direct rule in 1973 (after the Northern Irish government collapsed because of sectarian violence in the region), and is now in use for all elections except those to Westminster.
[77] African-Americans and political minorities such as supporters of the Communists and urban Republicans used STV to win seats.
After STV's removal and subsequent reversion to the current FPTP in New York in 1947, the Democratic Party immediately regained near unanimous control of municipal elections with Tammany Hall quickly returning to political dominance until its ultimate downfall in the mid-1960s.
Twin Oaks Community uses a version of STV they call Fair-Share Spending[84] to elect projects and set their budgets.
Differences from STV are that voters may only rank as many choices as nominees (five for most categories, with ten for best picture), and that at least one first preference is required for a candidate to be successful.
