Victor D'Hondt (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,
Ecuador,
Finland,
Hungary,
Israel,
Japan,
Macedonia, the
Netherlands,
Northern Ireland,
Paraguay,
Poland,
Portugal,
Scotland,
Slovenia,
Serbia,
Spain,
Switzerland,
Turkey,
Iceland,
Uruguay and
Wales. A modified D'Hondt system is used for elections to the
London Assembly.