Hare quota

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In the study of apportionment, the Hare quota (sometimes called the simple, ideal, or Hamilton quota) is the number of voters represented by each legislator under an idealized system of proportional representation, where every legislator represents an equal number of voters and where every vote is used to elect someone. The Hare quota is the total number of votes divided by the number of seats to be filled. The Hare quota was used in the original proposal for a single transferable vote system, and is still occasionally used, although it has since been largely supplanted by the Droop quota.

The quota continues to be used in setting electoral thresholds, as well as for calculating apportionments by the largest remainder method (LR-Hare) or other quota-based methods of proportional representation. In such use cases, the Hare quota gives unbiased apportionments that favor neither large nor small parties.^[1] However in certain circumstances, the use of Hare can allocate a majority of seats in a district to a party with less than a majority of votes in the district.^[2]