About the event:
The first recorded election under a proportional representation (PR) system took place on 17 December 1819, when the Birmingham Society for Scientific and Literary Improvement elected their Committee using new rules invented by one of their members, Thomas Wright Hill. Hill’s method, which focused on proportionate represention of the preferences of  individual voters, evolved into the Single Transferable Vote system (STV), which is now used by a range of parliaments and other public bodies, including the RSS itself. Later in the 19th century a number of other proportional representation systems were developed that, perhaps because they focus more on parties than on individuals, are even more widely used for parliaments and similar bodies across the world.

Recent years have brought the availability of large data sets of voting preferences, allowing new insights into how proportional systems, especially STV, perform in practice.  In society also there has been increasing interest in achieving greater fairness in elections, leading to renewed discussion of the principles underlying proportional representation systems.
    
The aims of the Royal Statistical Society event sponsored by the Social Statistics Section are to review the history of STV, to set it in the wider voting reform context, and to present some current research making use of the newly available large sets of voting data.

The schedule for the evening will be as follows:

4.30: Registration

5.00: Klina Jordan (Make Votes Matter)
What makes a good voting system?

5.30: Ian Simpson (Electoral Reform Society)
The case for STV in local elections: lessons from Scotland 

6.00: Wine reception - kindly sponsored by the Electoral Reform Society

6.30: Denis Mollison (Heriot-Watt University)
Fair votes in practice

7.15: General Discussion

7.30: Close

Full Abstracts available HERE

Attendance is free and open to all, whether fellows of the RSS or not, but pre-registration is required.