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-preference plurality, applied to multi-member districts where each voter casts just one vote. SNTV generally makes it unlikely that a single party will take over all seats in a city, as generally happens with winner-take-all systems. SNTV is highly similar to cumulative voting, and 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 STNV is equivalent to proportional representation by the D'Hondt method.

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