His original electoral system ideas included making The United Kingdom one huge electorate (Hare, in 1854, set the divisor as 654 the number of seats in the UK Parliament) (later he changed this to seven or eight hundred electorates) and that each voter would sign and check his vote. By 1873, however, he had adapted his ideas to take account of the secret vote. Under Hare's method, simply dividing the vote by the number of seats constituted the quota and then the surplus was expected to be distributed 'at random'.