I thought that Newland-Britton was the method of doing fractional transfers of surpluses rather than transferring randomly selected ballots
Newland-Britton rules http://www.cix.co.uk/~rosenstiel/stvrules/
Also, I got another message that seemed to be saying that it is very uncommon for actual list systems to use largest remainder forms of allocation such as Hare and Droop, and it is far more common to use "highest average," divisor-based methods such as D'Hondt and Saint-Legue. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
This is probably the case. The Largest Remainder method is easy but it produces paradoxes. Germany uses Hare-Niemeyer because they find d'Hondt too biassed. Yet they have a legal threshold to take back the advantage. They seem to be moving to Sainte-Lagu� because they don't like the paradoxes.
In the Sainte-Lagu� countries in Scandinavia, d'Hondt is used within parliaments and councils for the election of committees. It occurred to me some time ago that the reason for this could be that if you know how the votes are going to be distributed, you might be able to exploit the rounding rule to your advantage.
Olli Salmi ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
