im has been deducted, the
surplus votes are divided in due proportion among the second choice
names, and count for them. That is the essential idea of the whole
thing. At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splitting
votes, _which is the secret of all party political manipulation_
vanishes. You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your vote
will be good for C. You can make sure of A, and at the same time vote
for C. You are in no need of a "ticket" to guide you, and you need have
no fear that in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy the
prospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man without any
compensating advantage. The independent candidate does, in fact, become
possible for the first time. The Hobson's choice of the party machine is
abolished.

Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method,
the only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequate
representation of the community. Let us resort again to the constituency
I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates
represented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve
places. And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the leading
favourites. Suppose that there are twelve thousand voters in the
constituency, and that three thousand votes are cast for A--I am keeping
the figures as simple as possible--then A has two thousand more than is
needed to return him. _All_ the second votes on his papers are counted,
and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go to C; 500, or a sixth,
go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G; 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K
and L, and a hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, W
and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000 is divided in these proportions--that
is a fifth of 2,000 goes to C, a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc.,
in proportion. C, who already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is
now returned and has, moreover, 300 to spare; and the same division of
the next votes upon C's paper occurs as has already been made with A's.
But previously to this there has been a distribution of B's surplus
votes, B having got 1,200 of first votes. And so on. After the
distribution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the list,
there is a distribution of the second votes upon the papers of those who
have voted for the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list. At
last a point is reached when twelve candidates have a quota.