22 QUOTA IN PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION, II., 



R.S. TAS. 



Van de Walle, Victor. La Re presentation proporfion- 

 nelle integralement appliquee aux elections legislatives : 

 Proposition de loi (avant-projet). (Bruxelles : Imprim- 

 erie du Progres- V. Feron, 1910.) 



List Systems — The Method of the Uniform Quota. 



62. Finally, it remains to ])oint out that the 

 problem of apportioning seats among parties arises 

 from fixing before the election the number of seats 

 for each constituency. The problem can be avoided, and 

 a partition of seats among parties as exact as the size of 

 the legislature allows can be secured, if the number of 

 seats in the legislature is fixed, but the number of seat& 

 for each constituency is determined after the polling by 

 the number of votes polled in it. On this idea is based 

 the system of le nombre imique, or the uniform quota — 

 a system supported by the late Professor Ilenri Poincare 

 and other French mathematicians as the only exact method 

 of proportional representation, i"^*^'^) 



63. Hare proposed to use for the quota the number 

 obtained by dividing the total of the votes throughout the 

 country by the number of members in the House of Com- 

 mons. He also proposed that the whole country 

 should be one constituency ; a proposal which, with 

 other notions contained in his works, is usually thought 

 to have kept back for a generation the progress of pro- 

 portional representation in England. The same quota is 

 used in the system of le nombre unique; but the country 

 is divided into districts, as in other systems of proportional 

 representation, and these may be equal or unequal, as may 

 be convenient. The system assumes that the same parties 

 will contest the election in many districts or throughout 

 the country ; it would break down if there were many iso- 

 lated candidatures, but these are not to be expected when 

 the party system has become established. 



The votes for all the candidates of each party through- 

 out the country are totalled, and then the total number of 

 votes for all parties is obtained. This total is divided 

 by the number of members to be elected, and the result is 

 le nombre unique, or the uniform quota. 



The total number of votes for each party is then divided 

 by the quota. The quotient so obtained is the share of 

 representation of the party. If the sum of the quotients 



(**•) See not." (*"«), § 73. 



