Hare Quota

The Hare quota is the oldest and most straightforward formula for determining how many votes a party or candidate needs to win a seat under proportional representation. It is calculated as:

Hare quota = Total valid votes ÷ Total seats

Named after the English barrister Thomas Hare, who proposed it in his 1857 work The Machinery of Representation, the quota is used in two main families of PR systems:

• Single Transferable Vote (STV) variants – though most modern STV systems (Ireland, Australia, Malta) use the smaller Droop quota, some historical and academic models use Hare.
• Largest remainder method (LR-Hare) – parties first receive one seat for every full quota of votes they obtain, then remaining seats go to parties with the largest leftover vote fractions. This variant is sometimes called the Hamilton method in the United States, where Alexander Hamilton proposed it in 1792 for apportioning congressional seats.

Because the Hare quota is larger than alternatives like the Droop quota (votes ÷ (seats + 1) + 1) or the Imperiali quota, it tends to be more favourable to smaller parties, since larger parties exhaust their vote totals on full quotas and leave smaller remainders to compete for leftover seats. This proportionality-friendly bias is why countries seeking inclusive legislatures often prefer it.

Hare-LR has been used for legislative elections in jurisdictions including Hong Kong (Legislative Council geographical constituencies until the 2021 electoral overhaul), Namibia, and various Eastern European systems at different points. It is also occasionally used inside parliaments for committee allocation.

A known weakness is the Alabama paradox: under largest-remainder Hare, increasing the total number of seats can paradoxically cause a party to lose a seat. This flaw, identified in U.S. apportionment debates in the 1880s, contributed to the United States abandoning Hamilton's method in favour of divisor methods like Huntington–Hill.