Tasmania Has Used the Same Vote-Counting Math Since 1896

Andrew Inglis Clark was the Attorney-General of Tasmania and a constitutional lawyer with an unusual hobby: he had been corresponding with English barrister Thomas Hare about Hare's 1857 proposal for proportional representation by single transferable vote. In 1896, after several failed attempts, Clark got his version through the Tasmanian Parliament — but only on a trial basis, and only in the colony's two main cities. Hobart elected six MPs by it; Launceston elected four. The system was called Hare-Clark almost immediately, and it has been continuously running ever since.

The trial was renewed annually until 1902, then suspended. What brought it back was the rise of the Labour Party, which won eight seats in 1906. Clark argued — successfully — that proportional representation would distribute new-party gains more predictably than the existing single-member system, and the House extended Hare-Clark statewide for the 1909 election. The reform that was supposed to slow Labor in fact helped two-and-a-half-party politics settle in Tasmania for the next century.

The technical wrinkle Clark contributed was the Gregory method for transferring surplus votes. When a candidate exceeds the quota, his ballots are not sampled; they are all transferred at a fractional value, so every voter's preference flows the same way. Ireland later adopted Gregory for its 1925 Senate election. Tasmania added one more wrinkle in 1980: Robson Rotation, which randomizes the order of candidate names on the ballot to neutralize donkey voting and the advantage of being listed first.

A Tasmanian electoral education page still publishes worked examples of how a transfer count progresses. They look like spreadsheets. They are spreadsheets. The math is what survived.