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, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant and
skilled computer. A reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant
of the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothing
of account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultant
fractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper i