Victor D'Hondt

Victor d'Hondt

Victor D'Hondt (born November 20, 1841 in Ghent ; † May 30, 1901 there ) was a Belgian lawyer.

Life

The professor of civil and tax law at Ghent University was a strong advocate for proportional representation to give minorities the opportunity to be represented in elected bodies. In his paper published on this in 1882, he propagated the divisor method named after him with rounding off, which he described as the maximum number method. The seat allocation process can be described by a simple mathematical algorithm that maps the votes of the parties to (necessary whole-number) numbers of seats. The special feature of this procedure: The representation value of the party with the lowest representation value is maximized.

The D'Hondt procedure was used in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1983 to determine the distribution of seats between the parties in elections to the German Bundestag .

Fonts

• Système pratique et raisonné de representation proportionnelle . Bruxelles 1882.

literature

• Jules Carlier: Victor D'Hondt, Albert Nyssens - Notice et portrait , in: Représentation proportionnelle - Revue mensuelle No. 20/1901, pp. 29–41.