Single non-transferable vote

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Single non-transferable vote or SNTV is an electoral system used to elect multiple winners. It is a semi-proportional variant of first-past-the-post voting, applied to multi-member districts where each voter casts just one vote. It can also be seen as a variant of limited voting where each elector votes only once.

SNTV generally makes it unlikely that a single party will take all seats in a city, as generally happens with winner-take-all systems. SNTV can be considered a variant of dot voting where each voter has only one point to assign.

Unlike block voting or limited voting, where voters can cast multiple votes, under SNTV each voter casts just one. This produces a kind of semi-proportional representation at the district level, meaning small parties, as well as large parties, have a chance to be represented. Under certain assumptions, such as perfect tactical voting SNTV is equivalent to proportional representation by the D'Hondt method.

SNTV retains many of the problems of first-past-the-post voting (first-preference plurality voting), and as a result is sometimes viewed skeptically by social choice theorists. However, its extreme simplicity and easy vote-counting makes the system particularly popular for small elections to offices such as city councils, particularly when compared to the more-intricate single transferable vote (STV) system, and has resulted in the method becoming commonly used for ordering open party lists.