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Tom Monto

BC-STV animated video, quota, surplus transfers explained

Updated: Jan 17

BC's 2008 Yes STV campaign produced an animated video to explain how STV would work. The comments to the youtube loop inspired me to provide some clarification on quotas and the transfer of surpus votes.


The explanation of STV I came up with reads thus:

"Candidates run in multi-member districts, electing usually 3 to 7 members in a district.

Each voter casts a single vote but marks back-up preferences on the ballot. The ballots in a district are counted and sorted. Some votes elect one or more candidates on account of specific support. The surplus votes not needed by the winners are transferred. Some go to candidates of the same party, some to candidates of other parties. This creates further proportionality of representation of parties. These votes plus others transferred from eliminated low-ranking candidates are used to elect the best of the rest through formed consensus by grouping the remaining votes."


Thus a voter will assist in electing only one member. He or she casts a single vote but one with back-up preferences, one of which may be used to elect a member if election of the first choice is not possible.


The BC-STV animated video has this line:

"On your ballot you can show your preferences for more than one candidate because each of the new constituencies will have more than one MLA."


Oh sweet mama...

Does this strike you as odd or is it just me?


This would be more accurate if it read:

You can show your ranked preferences because each of the new constituencies will have more than one candidate. To avoid votes being wasted, each vote will be transferred to another candidate if the first choice is found to be impossible to elect and if transfer is possible. The voters' marked preferences instruct the election official how to transfer the vote if necessary.


The way that line in the video is written implies that you have multiple votes because you are electing multiple members. This sounds like Block Voting.


STV - even BC-STV - is quite clear - each voter has just one vote.


Then the video goes on to say.

You can vote for candidates from the same party or from different ones. Independents as well.


If by you is meant each individual single voter, which it is clear it is saying, then no, no, again no. Each voter can only vote for one. Each voter has only one vote.


On the video, the explanation of the vote transfers is also ...well...


The term transfer value was not used in the instructions for voters and election officials issued for the Alberta STV elections, from 1924 to 1955.


Instead John D. Hunt wrote (not in these exact words) that the group of votes transferred will be a replica assortment of all the votes that the successful candidate received, based on second choices.


The video could be worded thus:

Amanda Apple exceeded quota. Her vote tally was more than the quota. The extra votes are called surplus. They need to be transferred so they are not wasted.

Looking at the votes given to Amanda, you count the number of votes marked with second preferences for Bill Banana and compare them to the total number of votes that Amanda Apple received. This ratio is then used to compute how many of the surplus will go to Bill Banana. Two-thirds of them go to Billy Banana. It is found that all the rest of the second preferences on Amanda Apple's votes were marked for Eric Elderberry, so one-third of them go to him.

.[returning to the video] ..

After the transfer no one has enough votes to be elected. So now the candidate with the fewest votes (Celine Cherry) is eliminated.

The second preferences on Celine Cherry's ballots are counted. All favour Danielle Durlan.


[here's a problem -- the video says the votes are transferred at full value because they have not yet been used to elect candidate. But no vote can be used more than once to elect anyone. The extra votes were transferred, in Amanda Apple's case, because they were not used - they were not needed - to elect Amanda Apple.]


Better to say:

A Transfer of votes from an eliminated candidate is straight-forward - simply refer to the next preference marked on the ballot. However if any of the next preference is marked for someone already elected or already eliminated, then move on to the next effective marked preferences


returning to the video. The video states:

Danielle Durlan now has enough votes to be elected., ...

BC STV is fair and proportional. If a party gets 40 percent of the vote, it should (as nearly as possible) get 40 percent of the seats in the legislature.


[STV is a district-based system. it does not look at the proportion of votes a party takes overall.]


The line should be:


BC STV is fair and roughly proportional. At the district level, it elects mixed representation that reflects the sentiments of the voters in the district. One party does not take all the seats in a district. A majority of voters in each district will elect the majority of the seats in a district. If a party gets 35 percent of the vote in a district, party candidates chosen by voters get one third of the seats elected in the district. That's proportionality.



and then the video winds up, good enough as is.


So anyways those are my thoughts on the video.


---I must be in a bad mood, Darn city choppped down a tree that made my walk somewhat agreeable. Loud car noises, hot sun, COVID physical distancing, cars making dangerous right turns on red lights, cars making dangerous left turns on green lights are irritants and now a valued shade tree is gone - ah, city life is such a pleasure!


And I would like to respond to some of the comments<;

"The candidates will be grouped by party, so if you know which party you support you can go through the 3 or 4 candidates from them" Thank you for supporting my point. Under STV more voters will focus on a party of choice, rather than consider the individual merits of the candidates. Fewer people will consider the merits of voting for an alternative party or an independent, as their individual platforms will be lost in the crowd."


Actually Pro-rep writers have been saying for decades that STV would encourage the independent voter.

Under FPTP, people figure out which party has the best chance and lodge their vote there. trapped by the single-winner complex.

But under STV multiple candidates can win, not only the single front runner. Votes being transferable, a voter can feel liberty to vote for whom you want, knowing that (likely) your vote will be transferred and not wasted, even if you place your vote in such a way as to try to get an independent or an outlier elected.


Someone else commented that the threshold under STV would be much higher than in Israel. Confusion here is between the STV quota and the threshold used in a party-list PR system such as Israel's.

Israel's threshold is where a party can be banned from representation if it does not have enough portion of the vote.

STV's quota is to set at the district level. It is what portion of the vote is required to win a seat in that district.

The question then becomes -- which requires more votes - four percent of the overall vote, the threshold under Israel's party-list, or say 16 percent of the district vote under STV?

In the case of Calgary and Alberta in the 1955 provincial election, quota in Calgary was 8928; four percent of the province's total vote (378,179) was 15,000. So it took fewer votes to win under STV than to pass a four-percent threshold overall in that election. The job of election was thus easier especially if a candidate is well known locally.


Dividing the province into separate districts, an impossibility under at-large party-list PR, allows election of a strong local candidate. An Independent was elected in one district by just 2569 votes, an impossibility under a party-list system with a threshold above 1 percent. This person was elected in Bow Valley-Empress, under Alternative Voting, which like STV uses transferable votes.


The same sort of thing is deepened when you take an at-large STV city and divide it into a few separate multi-seat STV districts.

Winnipeg went from a single district electing 10 (quota 9 percent of the city vote) to four districts electing three each (quota dropped to 7 percent of the city vote). Part of this reduction was caused by fact quota is based on a number one greater than the number of seats in a district. (the total vote divided by four (four districts) times (three seats plus 1) = total divided by 16 = 7 percent.

Without the division into separate districts, Winnipeg's 12 seats would have been filled with quota of 8 percent of the city vote.


The division into separate districts creates multiple effects -


Gerrymandering

Districts allow the gerrymander (for a government to organize districts to better its chances). This is done by splitting a locally-strong voting block that is opposed to the government and making the potentially strong block into weak minorities in two or more districts. Gerrymandering can also create easy seats for government candidates in as many districts as possible by lumping a great number of opposition votes into a single seat - this gives the opposition the one seat but means that many of their votes are wasted as surplus in that one district.


Locally-strong minority representation

On the other hand, districting can mean some success for a minority with specific geographic strength. It might take a seat and achieve better representation than under a city-wide election. Sometimes that lucky local winner has jut a very small portion of the province-wide vote. An Independent won a seat in Olds-Disbury in 1982 with just .3 percent of the vote. but at same time a party with 5 percent of the vote often does not take even one seat. And a party with almost 25 percent of the vote only takes two or three seats.


Returning to the discussion of the practical effects of the quota, do note that it is possible under STV for a candidate to win a seat with less than quota. If he or she survives till the end of the process of vote counting, as the field of candidates thins through eliminations, he or she will take a seat when the field thins to the same number as the number of remaining open seats, even if he or she does not have quota.


A Celine Cherry fan commented that she was disenfranchised and cursed Danielle Dulhan. She was not disenfranchised more than under FPTP. Celine was the least-popular candidate and had no chance to be elected. Under FPTP, the voter would have been ignored, her vote thrown out the window. But under STV her vote was transferred. According to the video, every voter who voted for Celine gave second preference to Danielle. They could not elect Celine but they preferred Danielle over that Eric Elderberry - I never did like that man. So instead of being ignored and wasted, the votes were transferred to Danielle and secured her election, not that goof Elderberry who had been leading in votes up to that point.

Doom9000 made a couple points that I want to respond to:

1) how do i hold a MLA accountable when i have 7 that are representing me? if i had one it would be easily said I'm not voting for him I'll vote for the other guy.


Response: Still in STV just like FPTP, if you don't like a guy, don't vote for him. The advantage to holding a person accountable under STV is that under STV there will probably be more than one candidate running for each major party, so you don't need to swallow your individual distaste for the candidate when you want to support the party. You have a choice. Vote for the party you prefer and also for the individual candidate of that party you most prefer.

And don't vote for the party candidate you dislike and want to hold accountable. Pretty much the only way to hold a politician to account is to not support his re-election by voting for someone else.

STV, in many cases, allows you to choose which of a party's candidates you give your vote to, unlike under FPTP where there is only one candidate of each party. Under FPTP if you want to support a party you must vote for that one candidate whether you want to or not.


[Doom9000]: 2) you still didn't prove me wrong that it seems people will get more for their vote if they vote for more thus instead of sticking to candidates people will be able to be indecisive and say you know what i am going to vote for this guy but i am not sure i guess I'll place more number to prove that i am indecisive.


RESPONSE: under STV each voter only has one vote - STV is not cumulative voting. All that a voter shows when he or she plumbs - only votes for one candidate - is that he or she is lazy, or just does not care whom is elected if he or she can't get their first choice. The only result is that if the first choice candidate is not elected, that one vote will be wasted by being put on the exhausted pile. No worse than under FPTP where a third or as high as 60 or more percent of the votes are wasted in each district.


If decisive means that your vote will be more likely wasted, then the voter who plumbs is very decisive indeed.


Another comment that I want to respond to:

I understand taking second preferences from the least-popular candidate (similar to IRV, aka AV), but how you do decide what votes to spread from the most popular, and why do you do this, and how is it proportional if you do this?


RESPONSE:

As outlined above, the transfer of surplus votes is done proportionally to the breakdown of the total votes received by the candidate. Although hardly ever stated in so many words, the transfer is the result of certain votes remaining with the candidate to make up the votes that the candidate takes with him or her when he or she goes to the winners circle. The distribution of the votes that the candidate retains is a reduced mirror image of the total votes he or she received, and the votes transferred are similarly proportional but again (usually) even smaller.


Example:

Quota is 12

Daisy total votes 18 6 marked Daisy - Cheryl ...; 12 marked Daisy - Georgina...

Daisy keeps 12 votes, the quota she needed to win

these are: 4 marked Daisy - Cheryl ...; [Mathematically 6 is to 18 as X is to 12. X = 4] 8 marked Daisy - Georgina... [Mathematically 12 is to 18 as Y is to 12. Y = 8]


surplus 6 needs to be transferred to other candidates

Cheryl receives 2 transferred votes marked Daisy - Cheryl ...

Georgina receives 4 transferred votes marked Daisy - Georgina...


Simple as that. [In practice, it is not as simple as this with a transfer moving perhaps 132 and 1/3 votes for example. But fairly reconciling that mathematical need with the use of full votes has been worked out as well, in the past in a simple process. See John D. Hunt's STV explanation in the book A Report on Alberta Elections for example.]


Thanks for reading.

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