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IF you ever play the game Famous Belgians, then remember the name Joseph Auguste D’Hondt alongside Audrey Hepburn and Hercule Poirot. D’Hondt (1841-1901) was the eponymous inventor of a system of proportional representation for counting votes that will likely determine Scotland’s constitutional future. Apart from the fact he was a professor of civil law at Ghent Universit and married an English woman called Anne Clifford, Mr D’Hondt has left little by way of an historic footprint. Apart, that is, from his elegant but fiendishly complicated vote counting method. Proportional representation became an issue the moment democracy reared its head with the American Revolution. The second US President, John Adams, summed up the issue thus: “A governing assembly should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them”. The problem lies in how to elect that assembly, so it reflects the electorate at large. The 19 ....