The Single Transferable Vote is an electoral system that produces ‘proportional representation’ while at the same time giving voters more choice over who their elected representative will be.

Proportional representation (PR) refers to any electoral system, which elects several people together in a way that parties get shares of the seats, which more proportionately reflect their shares of the votes. Often this doesn’t happen with the ‘first past the post’ system which is currently used.

Several councillors have to be elected together if voters who support different parties are to be more fairly represented. This is the key reason for the boundary review and the extension of the wards to form larger multi-member wards. From 2007 there will be 7 wards in East Lothian 5 represented by 3 councillors and 2 wards represented by 4 councillors. To read more about multimember wards please click here.

When you cast your vote you list the candidates in order of preference, starting with ‘1’ for your first choice, ‘2’ for your second and so on until you no longer wish to express a preference, your vote is still only a single vote. If the candidate who is your first choice does not have enough support to be elected and is therefore eliminated then your votes are transferred to your second preference at full value of one. Again if this candidate did not have enough support the same transfer would take place to your third preference and so on. If the candidate who is your first choice has more than enough support and is elected with surplus to the quota needed to be elected, then the surplus votes are again transferred to the second preference but at a lesser value, so no votes are deemed wasted by accumulating for one candidate.

The STV method has been used for many years in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where the votes are counted manually, which can take about 2 days and often even longer. For the combined Scottish 2007 elections the count will be carried out electronically, which will be a first for Scotland though the technology has been successfully used in a variety of pilots and elections, including the London Assembly, Mayoral and European Parliament election count in 2004 and the City of Westminster Local Council and Mayoral election in 2002. DRS Data and Research Services are supplying all the technology and support. This will mean a very different type of count from the past, however it should be much quicker than an equivalent manual count and is considered to be both reliable and secure.

STV is used around the world, for example in Northern Ireland for local councils, the Assembly, and the European Parliament elections, the Republic of Ireland, in Australia, for the Parliament and Senate elections, in New Zealand and Malta.