With Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote (this specification is necessary, because there are also the inferior imitations of various election-riggers figuring as proportional representation), it is impossible to prevent the effective candidature of independent men of repute beside the official candidates.

The method of voting under the Proportional Representation system has been ignorantly represented as complex.  It is really almost ideally simple.  You mark the list of candidates with numbers in the order of your preference.  For example, you believe A to be absolutely the best man for parliament; you mark him 1.  But B you think is the next best man; you mark him 2.  That means that if A gets an enormous amount of support, ever so many more votes than he requires for his return, your vote will not be wasted.  Only so much of your vote as is needed will go to A; the rest will go to B. Or, on the other hand, if A has so little support that his chances are hopeless, you will not have thrown your vote away upon him; it will go to B. Similarly you may indicate a third, a fourth, and a fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name on your paper with a number to indicate the order of your preferences.  And that is all the voter has to do.  The reckoning and counting of the votes presents not the slightest difficulty to any one used to the business of computation.  Silly and dishonest men, appealing to still sillier audiences, have got themselves and their audiences into humorous muddles over this business, but the principles are perfectly plain and simple.  Let me state them here; they can be fully and exactly stated, with various ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic remarks, and digressions, in seventy lines of this type.

It will be evident that, in any election under this system, any one who has got a certain proportion of No. 1 votes will be elected.  If, for instance, five people have to be elected and 20,000 voters vote, then any one who has got 4001 first votes or more must be elected. 4001 votes is in that case enough to elect a candidate.  This sufficient number of votes is called the quota, and any one who has more than that number of votes has obviously got more votes than is needful for election.  So, to begin with, the voting papers are classified according to their first votes, and any candidates who have got more than a quota of first votes are forthwith declared elected.  But most of these elected men would under the old system waste votes because they would have too many; for manifestly a candidate who gets more than the quota of votes needs only a fraction of each of these votes to return him.  If, for instance, he gets double the quota he needs only half each vote.  He takes that fraction, therefore, under this new and better system, and the rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 upon that voting paper.  And so on.  Now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled computer,