Sir Thomas Hare (28 March 1806 in England – 6 May 1891) was a British lawyer, MP and proponent of electoral reform. In particular he was the inventor of the Single Transferable Voting system, now used in many places in the world. Life He was born on 28 March 1806, was the only son of A Hare of Leigh, Dorset. On 14 November 1828 he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, and was called to the bar on 22 November 1833. He practised in the chancery courts and from 1841 reported in Vice-chancellor Wigram's court. He studied law, and was called to the Bar in November 1833 and published several works on judges' decisions. In 1853 he became Inspector of Charities and was later Assistant Commissioner on the Royal City Charities Commission, about which he published several books. Elected a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, he resigned from political office in 1846. He became a Peelite, and broke with the Conservatives, but did not wish to join the Liberal Party, preferring to maintain his independence. Family He married, first, in Dorsetshire on 7 August 1837, Mary, daughter of Thomas Samson of Kingston Russell. She died on 21 October 1855, and was buried in the churchyard of Brompton church. They had eight children. The eldest daughter, Marian, wife of the Rev. W. R. Andrews of Eastbourne, has written under the pseudonym of 'Christopher Hare;' the second daughter, Alice, married Professor Westlake. Hare married, secondly, on 4 April 1872, Eleanor Bowes Benson (1833–1890), second sister of Edward White Benson, archbishop of Canterbury, by whom he had issue Mary Eleanor (1874–1883). Views Hare was said to have been 'conspicuous for great industry – to have wide interests in life and clearness of intellectual vision'. He was a member of the London-based Political Economy Club and the British Dictionary of National Biography says of him: Hare's energies were concentrated in an attempt to devise a system which would secure proportional representation of all classes in the United Kingdom, including minorities in the House of Commons and other electoral assemblies. His original electoral system ideas included each voter casting a single preferential vote in an at-large district covering the entire United Kingdom. The electorate would be divided into similarly-sized groups each electing one representative. Hare, in 1854, set the divisor as 654, based on the number of seats in the UK Parliament. He