Victor D'Hondt

Victor D’Hondt^[1] (20 November 1841 - 30 May 1901) was a Belgian lawyer, salesman, jurist of civil law at Ghent University, and mathematician. He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections. The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, and Wales. A modified D'Hondt system is used for elections to the London Assembly.

Publications

• Système pratique et raisonné de représentation proportionnelle. Bruxelles, 1882.

Notes

1. ^ D'Hondt's last name is often misspelled as d’Hondt.

Confusion may arrive when reading articles on D'Hondt from the Netherlands, since in that country when using the full name one should write: Victor d'Hondt (with a small d), while the surname all by itself would be D'Hondt (with a capital D). However, in Belgium it is always capitalized, hence: Victor D'Hondt.