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Victor D'Hondt

 
Political Dictionary: Victor d'Hondt

(1841-1901) Belgian lawyer and enthusiast for proportional representation. His formula for assigning seats to parties in multiseat districts was, unknown to him, the same as that proposed a century earlier by Jefferson to assign seats to states in the US Congress after each decennial census (see apportionment). The d'Hondt (Jefferson) system is biased in favour of large parties. Unsurprisingly, it is the most popular of the apportionment rules used nowadays by parties to assign each other seats in assemblies with proportional representation.

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Wikipedia: Victor D'Hondt
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Victor D’Hondt[1] (20 November 1841 - 30 May 1901) was a Belgian lawyer, salesman, jurist of civil law at Ghent University, and mathematician. He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections. The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, and Wales. A modified D'Hondt system is used for elections to the London Assembly.

Notes

  1. ^ D'Hondt's last name is often misspelled as d’Hondt.

Confusion may arrive when reading articles on D'Hondt from the Netherlands, since in that country when using the full name one should write: Victor d'Hondt (with a small d), while the surname all by itself would be D'Hondt (with a capital D). However, in Belgium it is always capitalized, hence: Victor D'Hondt.


 
 
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