While everybody is digesting the results from Iowa and guessing how it might impact next Tuesday’s vote in New Hampshire, it is a good time to take a brief look over at elections in Europe — specifically the Republic of Ireland which will vote this Saturday.  What makes Ireland different is that it is one of a handful of countries that use the Single Transferable Vote.

The Single Transferable Vote system is a hybrid of proportional representation and preferential/ranked-choice voting.  Currently, the Democratic Party uses proportional representation to allocate delegates to presidential candidates.  As an initial caveat, both proportional representation and single transferrable vote require multi-member districts.  For the Democratic Party, delegates are allocated in multi-member districts — on both a state-wide and congressional district basis. (Typically, the congressional districts have between four and ten delegates.  State-wide delegates range from a low of two party leader delegates in Wyoming to ninety at-large delegates in California.)  For Ireland, the members of its parliament are elected in thirty-nine constituencies with the constituencies electing between three and five members to parliament.

There are three basic questions that a proportional representation system has to answer. First, how to decide fractional members?  In any system, after all the votes are counted, there is a set number of votes that exactly equals a certain number of delegates/members of parliament.  But, the odds that all of the candidates/parties will end up getting exactly the right number of votes is very, very slim.  Instead, it is likely that some candidates/parties will be  100 or 1,000 votes show of the number needed to win the next delegate/seat, and that other parties will have 100 or 1,000 votes more than the number need to win the previous delegate/seat.  This process is easy when you have two parties/candidates, you simply round up any fraction over .5 and round down any fraction under .5.  But when you have multiple parties, rounding may give you too many or too few seats.   Thus, a system using proportional representation needs to have a system for deciding which parties/candidates get the leftover delegates/seats once you are down to fractional seats.

Second, in any proportional system, you need to decide what the threshold is for winning seats.  Of course, in a district with few enough seats, you can just ignore threshold and just go with whole seats and your rounding rules for fractional seats as only the largest parties will win seats.  But if you are allocating a large number of positions (like California’s 90 at-large delegates), you will get a lot of the less popular parties and candidates winning delegates/seats which is a problem when you need to get a majority to decide anything.  So many countries with proportional representation opt to establish a threshold (currently the Democratic Party uses a threshold of 15% with some exceptions).

Third, what about wasted votes (particularly those voting for parties/candidates that miss the threshold).  Those votes are essentially discarded as are extra votes for parties that fail to get an extra delegagte/seat under the rounding rules,

The Single Transferable Vote system resolves those issues by not deciding them in advance but rather leaving it to the voters to decide.  And the system does in by using ranked-choice voting.

The core of the Single Transferable Vote System starts with the concept of a quota.  The formula for calculating a quota is the total number of valid votes cast plus one vote in the numerator and the total number of seats plus one seat in the denominator with the result rounded up.  Basically, if you have six seats, you need to get over one-seventh of the vote to guarantee being one of the top six candidates.  (For example, assume 70 votes cast in an election.  One-seventh of the vote is 10 votes.  Mathematically, you could have six candidates with 11 votes each — unlikely but possible — but that would leave the seventh candidate with four votes.  However, seven candidates could get ten votes each.  Thus, to guarantee being in the top six, a candidate needs that extra vote.)

While the various forms of Single Transferable Votes have some complexities (given that different voters give different rankings to candidates) the basic idea is that you start by determining who has reached a quota (or quotas if you do not allow voters to rank candidates within a party’s list).  At that point, you deduct the number of votes needed to reach that quota.  After all quotas have been accounted for, that leaves you with the excess/fractional votes of the candidates/parties.  If you have a candidate based system, you assign the excess votes to the next candidate on the voter’s list.  (The different systems have different rules for determining which votes are excess — either using a random system or simply using a fraction of each person’s vote.  For a fractional system, if the quota is two-thirds of a candidate’s total, one-third of each person’s vote is an excess vote to be distributed.)  In a candidate-based system, it is possible (especially when most of the excess goes to a candidate from the same party as the original candidate) that the extra votes for the first-choice candidate of a party exceeds (particularly when added to votes that deviated from the party’s recommendation) gives a quota to the second-choice candidate of the party.  This process continues until there is no more excess from elected candidates to distribute.  At that point, you are left with candidates and parties that have some votes but not enough for the next quota.

At this stage of the proceeding, the next step matches the typical ranked-choice system.  You eliminate the last placed-party/candidate and distribute those votes to the next candidate/party on those voter’s list.  You continue until some party/candidate reaches a quota.  At that point, the party/candidate receives the next seat and the quota is deducted from their total.  The excess vote is then distributed to the next candidate/party on the list of those votes that were just transferred to that candidate/party (again using either a random or fractional system).  This process continues until all quotas are filled.

Now, in Ireland, they use a candidate-based system.  A party can run as many candidates as there are seats to be filled.  Typically, most voters will rank their preferred party’s candidates at the top of the preference list.  (The party may suggest which candidate should be ranked first, etc., but voters are free to use a different order.)  For the leading party in a constituency, the first ranked candidate will probably get a quota on the first preference vote and the excess votes will go to the second-ranked candidate (who may or may not then also reach the quota).  The minor parties and the lower-ranked candidates of the major parties are then eliminated and the votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates until all of the seats are filled.

Now, if the Democrats were to go to a single transferrable vote system in a state, there would need to be some rules changes.  First, you would probably eliminate thresholds.  Of course, you could keep the threshold and only apply the quotas to a candidates list once they reached fifteen percent.  Figuring out how to work with eliminating excess votes when you still had candidates left under fifteen percent would require some thought, but you could place a “hold” on distributing the excess votes from qualified candidates until all remaining candidates have passed the threshhold.  Second, it would be possible to do either a candidate-based system for the delegate candidates or a list-based system (if you elected the delegates later).   The one potential obstacle to a candidate-based system is the rules requiring gender balance in the delegation because voters could ignore the ranking given by the candidates (which presumably could be required to have a gender-balance).  The key is that single transferrable vote, like ranked choice voting, would give supporters of candidates who fail to meet the threshold to still have a voice in the allocation of delegates instead of having their votes cancelled as occurs under the current rules in traditional primary states.

Obviously, the one downside of any ranked-choice system is that it takes additional time (beyond the time to finish the initial count) to do the subsequent rounds.  In Australia which uses single transferrable vote at the state level for its Senate elections, it takes several weeks to complete the count given the total votes to be counted.  On the other hand, Ireland with less than 70,000 votes total per district, typically finishes the count within three or four days.

Now, since we are using Ireland as an example, its only fair to talk a little bit about the actual politics in Ireland. There are eight parties expected to compete for the seats.  While parties can run as many candidates as there are seats available, the actual number filed reflects how hard it is to win more than two or three in a constituency (depending on its size).  In the last election, there was only one constituency in which a party won three seats.  Even in the five-seat constituencies, typically the largest party only won two of the five seats. So even the largest parties are only running around 80 candidates for 160 possible seats.  Running extra candidates just increases the likelihood of a split vote in which your candidates are eliminated first rather than all of the votes being united behind your top (or second) candidate.

The two largest parties in Ireland have traditionally been Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.  Both parties have their roots in different factions from the 1920s in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War and  initially reflected different approaches to the treaty creating the Irish Free State prior to it gaining full independence.  Both are generally centrist parties and — to somebody outside the Republic — the differences are not always clear.  (If we have any Irish readers, I am sure that they will correct me on the difference between them.)  The third largest party is Sinn Fein (which operates in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland).  Sinn Fein is a socialist party that strongly supports the reunification of Ireland (an issue that is quite controversial in Northern Ireland and seen mostly as a someday, but not necessarily today, thing in the Republic) with connections to the Irish Republican Party.  (Current polls are showing a very close race for the popular vote between these three parties.  Those polls are within the margin of error.  Thus, even thought the most recent polls are pointing toward Sinn Fein winning the popular vote, they are close enough that a popular vote win by either of the other two parties would merely be a routine deviation from the poll caused by routine random sampling issues.  Additionally, the parties are close enough (and all are polling low enough) that it will be the distribution of preferences that will determine who wins the most seats regardless of who wins the popular vote).

Beyond these three parties, as in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party is a socialist party that arose from the trade union movement.  The last two elections have not been kind to Labour as they have been replaced by Sinn Fein as the “third” party in Ireland.  There are two other socialist parties and a Green Party.  Finally, the last of the “major” parties is Aontu — formed by pro-life members of Sein Fein — which may be the only socially conservative socialist party around.

Obviously, a key issue in the election is the aftermath of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.  For Ireland, there are two key aspects to this issue that make Ireland unique.  First, there is simply the fact that Ireland actually shares a border with the United Kingdom.   When both Ireland and the United Kingdom were in the EU together, this border was effectively just a line on the map.  With the United Kingdom now out of the EU, how to enforce tariffs, product safety regulations, and other matters related to the cross-border travel of goods and persons has to be addressed.  For the rest of the EU, goods from the UK are coming in via airport or harbor that already have those checks for goods from non-EU countries.  Even France merely needs to put a checkpoint at one location — the exit from the Chunnel to cover motor vehicle transport.  Ireland has multiple locations where goods can come from the U.K, by rail or motor vehicle.  Second, Northern Ireland is currently a very weird political entity.  While Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, the current agreement between the U.K, the Republic, and the major parties in Northern Ireland reflect a role for the Republic in some aspects of the government of Northern Ireland.  And, the terms of that agreement reflect that, if the circumstances in Northern Ireland materially change, Northern Ireland could be given a vote on leaving the United Kingdom and becoming part of the Republic.  At the very least, Sinn Fein believes that the fact that Northern Ireland voted against leaving the EU and has been forced out of the EU by the rest of the United Kingdom — primarily by England — should trigger such an election.  How Northern Ireland connects to the rest of the UK and how it connects to Ireland (and through Ireland the rest of the EU) is still a on-going issue.

Because a lot of the issues surrounding Brexit and the post-Brexit relation between the UK and the EU will be decided at the EU level,  it is unclear how much the Irish government will be able to shape the terms of the final agreement between the EU and the UK.  All of the parties running on Saturday, however, want voters to believe that they are the ones that will best be able to make sure that the Republic’s interests are protected by whatever trade deal is reached between the EU and the U.K.

As with other proportional representation systems, Single Transferrable Vote does make it easier for mid-size parties to win seats in parliament. (In theory, the system used by the Democratic Party should result in contested conventions but financial restraints tend to force mid-level candidates to drop out before most of the delegates are elected.)  As a result, it is highly unlikely that any part will win an actual majority in parliament.  However, normally, if there is a clear largest party, that party is able to form a coalition government of some sort (whether an actual majority or an agreement that gives enough votes to survive any motion of no confidence.)

And the results may matter here in the U.S.  One of Trump’s repeated promises is to enter into the greatest trade agreement ever with the U.K. know that the U.K. is out of the European Union.  Whether that is possible (and given Trump’s history of translating hyperbole into actual policy it is dubious) may depend on how things go with the negotiations between the EU and the U.K.  And, given that Ireland has a very strong interest (stronger than most other members of the EU) in the terms of the trade agreement between the EU and the UK, who ends up in charge in Ireland could create a chain reaction that impacts what terms the U.S. can reach with the U.K.

So Saturday will be an interesting demonstration in how to make sure that everybody’s vote does count.  And it will have an impact on U.S. foreign policy.  Only time will tell in what way.