Tag Archives: Single Transferrable Vote

Single Transferable Vote and the Presidential Primary

By tmess2 | Published February 5, 2020

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. Continue Reading...

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Oscars and Politics

By tmess2 | Published March 4, 2018

When one thinks of experiments in voting systems, you rarely think of motion pictures.  About a decade ago (starting with the 2009 awards), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) changed the rules for picking the Academy Award (Oscar) for best picture.  They made an additional change several years ago to the nomination process for Best Picture.

For most of the awards, the rules are that academy members belong to a given branch (e.g. actors, writers, etc.) and each member gets to submit a “nomination” ballot for the awards given by their branch  (i.e. actors for the acting awards, directors for best director).  Potential nominees who meet a certain threshold (up to 5 total) become the nominees.  After nominations are announced, a second ballot goes out to all academy members who vote for one nominee.  The nominee who gets the most votes (the traditional first-past-the-post system) is the winner.

In choosing the nominees, however, AMPAS has used a “single transferable vote” system for picking nominees.  This system is similar to the one used in Ireland and in Australia (for Senate elections).   In this system, voters list multiple candidates with a rank next to each candidate.  There is a certain number of votes (quota) needed for a nomination (the total number of votes plus one divided by the available slots plus one).  If a potential nominee received more than the require number of votes, their excess votes are distributed to the second choice of the voters.  There are variations on how the distribution works.  Some randomly pick excess ballots.  Others assign a fraction of all ballot (i.e. if 10% of your ballots are excess, each ballot counts as 0.1 votes in the next round).   For most of the awards, AMPAS uses a fractional system with one catch — surpluses are distributed only if the nominee exceeds the required number of votes by more than 20%.    After the excess ballots are distributed, the process moves to the bottom ranked candidates.  Those candidates are eliminated and those votes are  redistributed to the second choice of the voters.  (Or third or fourth choice depending upon who is already nominated or eliminated.)  This process continues until all the slots are filled. Continue Reading...

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