In discussing multi-member pref voting [STV], the complexities of vote transfers seem to get more attention than does the need for multi-member districts.
As a result, many people do not understand the need for multi-member districts.
Here is a link to a 2011 NZ comment about STV, which I think explains it well.
Note that NZ's choice of MMP was (IMHO) very much influenced by what New Zealanders knew of the Australian preferential voting systems. Australia used STV for its Senate elections and that was fine except the system used forced voters to mark all the candidates (or to use group ticket voting) or have their vote disallowed. (Canadian STV systems allowed voters to mark only as many preferences as they wanted to.)
Someone wrote:
In discussing multi-member pref voting [STV], the complexities of vote transfers seem to get more attention than does the need for multi-member districts.
As a result, many people do not understand the need for multi-member districts.
Here is a link to a 2011 NZ comment about STV, which I think explains it w.ell.
https://tryingtoreason.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/on-stv-and-proportionality/
Note that NZ's choice of MMP was (IMHO) very much influenced by what New Zealanders knew of the Australian preferential voting systems."
I would say:
STV is a system by which voters cast by voters are reflected by the mixture of members elected in the district.
Each district elects multiple members. This means many candidates are presented to voters, often more than one from a specific party, and a number of parties are represented among the candidates, possibly as well as independents.
Candidates are elected (or not) based on how many first preferences they receive or how many votes transferred to them when other candidates are eliminated or elected. But most or all of the candidates who led in the vote count in the first count before any transfers are done are elected in the end.
This is still fair, because each voter has just one vote so the combination of Single voting and multi-seat districts means that a mixed crop of candidates are among the front runners in the first count, before any transfers are done. No one party can take all the seats unless it has a high, high portion of the votes.
Party identification is not used in the election process. That is one reason why PR-STV can be used in political and non-political settings, with and without parties.
Instead votes vote directly for candidates. and votes are transferred - when they are transferred, that is - according to back-up preference marked by the voter.
Many votes are not transferred at all.
any votes bearing first preference to a candidate who is elected at the end will not be transferred;
any voter cast for a candidate who is not elected nor eliminated will not be transferred.
Transfers ensure proportionality (based on party vote tallies) in cases where one candidate of a party received large portion of the party vote and the party is due more than that one seat - if that candidates' supporters allocate back-up preferences to other candidates of the same party. The marking of back-up preferences is up to the voter's own choice - or in Canadian practice even to whether or not to mark back-up preferences at all.
Members are elected by exceeding quota or by surviving despite candidate elimination to be there at end to fill the remaining seats when number of remaining candidates is thinned to the number of remaining open seats. That is to say that some are elected by achieving quota while others are elected with only partial quota. That is the case where voters are not required to rank all the candidates, which was the rule in past use of STV in Canadian elections.
The requirement for each voter to mark all candidates or instead to mark just a party slate or to rank a number of party slates puts extra work on the votes - work not required in FPTP. Australia puts this requirement on voters and is cause for complaint. Ireland and Malta, the only other places in the world where federal elections are held using STV, do not require full ranking.
New Zealand saw the complaints in Australia and instead of adopting past practice in Canada (now mostly forgotten even by Canadians) or current practice in Malta or Ireland, decided the party list method would be used for top-up seats in a MMP system.
(New Zealand is now using STV in regional, city and health board elections so its knowledge of the benefits of STV is increasing with each year.
Note that in the Wellington regional council elections, held using STV, this rule applies:
"You can vote for as many or as few candidates as you like." from Single Transferable Vote (stv.govt.nz) (by which they mean you can mark preferences for as many as you want to - by principle, STV is single voting, each voter casts just one vote)
so why that simple rule - addressing what I think is the main cause of complaints among Australian voters - was not used in NZ federal elections using STV, I don't know.)
If ranking of all candidates is not required, some voters will not do it. and if their vote is to be transferred and the ballot does not bear any useful back-up preference(s), it will not be transferred to another candidate and will be deemed "exhausted" and taken out of the equation. As mentioned, some votes are never considered for transfer so marking - or not marking - back-up preference may or may not make a difference in the end.
Even where no back-up preferences are marked, the results under STV is different from results held using FPTP, with more votes used effectively - used to elect someone - than the usual variety of FPFP elections. That is because multiple members are elected in each district, with no party able to take all the seats in the district under normal conditions.
Even if under FPTP, Party A's success in District Western X is balanced against Party B's success in District Eastern X, thus establishing across-the-board proportionality or balance (based on party vote tallies), the Party B voters in District Western X and the Party A voters in District Eastern X do not have any direct relationship to a member representing their beliefs.
The benefits of single voting and multiple-member districts are such that occasionally the vote transfer make no difference to the front runners in the first count - that is, the candidates who win under STV are identical to those who would have won under Single Non-transferable Voting. Proportionality is still assured (as much proportionality as voter want anyway) but was not created by transfers. it was not done by the simple but effective use of single voting in multi-member districts, with transfers merely used as a check to verify that the result was what voters wanted, even after the un-popular candidates were eliminated and their votes re-distributed.
reI was recently asked if the were ways to game the system, to get more seats than you are due. The sheer cunning behind the question stalled my response.
The easy answer to that is to say there is no effective way to get more seats than your voter support makes you due.
But note that a candidate or a party's multiple candidates may get more support than just from the voters who give he/she or them first choice - if the candidate(s) are pleasing and attractive to voters who initially voted for other parties, they may get more votes through transfers and take more seats but that is just a different form of voter support.
(A more centrist party generally receives more transfer than one on the edge of the gradient of beliefs. This fact leads many to expect a positive softening of today's polarization under STV.)
Obviously any party that encourages its voters to mark back-up preferences for all its candidates and to no others will do better than it would otherwise and perhaps better than a party that does not advise that - if voters abide by the advice.
There are other ways to get more votes than you might otherwise and perhaps more seats than you might otherwise.
A party that runs a variety of candidates women and men, of different languages and races where that is a factor, old and young, of different parts of the district may take more initial votes than one with narrow range of candidates - and if the voters who give their first preference to any candidate of that party allocates their back-up preference to other candidates of that same party and to no others, that party may take exactly the number of seat that its vote tally in the first count makes it due, while others do not if their voters dribble away by allocating back-up preferences to candidates of other parties.
Also some parties try to get votes to vote first for a certain candidate then hope that vote transfer will move down the line through transfers of surpluses allowing their party to take the seats it deserved.
While other parties try to equalize out the vote tallies among of their candidates so that many are at the bottom end of the vote tallies and are eliminated early, allowing the votes to come together and help elect the proper number of seats for the party - if voters give back-up preferences along party line.
So if two different opposing techniques are used as way to game the system, it seems there is no real way to game the STV - a party gets the seats the voters - taken as a whole as counted over the entire process - feel you deserve.
One thing is a factor in cases where voters rank all candidates. In such cases there are no exhausted votes and candidates are elected by achieving quota and are not elected if they not achieve quota. Some candidates are never eliminated nor elected, their back-up preferences are never considered and they are not used to help others who may be close to election. These votes are not used effectively - so a party wants to avoid that.
But in Canadian practice, the final seats were filled through candidates taking seats by mere survival despite the field of candidates thinning due to eliminations, so there were no candidates who were not either elected or eliminated except the very last one. so that cause of in-effective votes was not a critical factor. Therefore in Canadian STV elections parties did not need to worry about that. Being the last unsuccessful candidate in an STV election was a downer but no more than missing out on a single seat by only 6 votes or 20 or 50 votes, which happens often under FPTP. Not everyone can win even under STV.
But the most-popular candidates and the most generally-popular candidates were elected, so you could say that plurality is used to determine the successful candidates, with quota being the benchmark that allows the transfer of surplus votes. to help bring up votes of others to ensure that each party that is due more than one seat in the district gets their due share of seats if at all possible and if it is the will of voters to send support to those other candidates of that party.
It might be pointed out that electing multiple members is not sufficient for proportionality; that you need something that uses some form of quota.
STV does use quota to elect at least some of the candidates and uses relative popularity to elect others.
The preferences that voters mark are contingency things - used only if previous preference is found to be ineffective. Ranked voting under STV is really just a series of votes with each one in the series after the first is used only as contingency.
When MMP measures party support and allocates seats in proportion to that, it does not consider the voters' sentiment or preference among the party's candidates. The order is pre-set by party and a voter wanting to support party A must be understanding that if Party A only elects one member, it will be Candidate M, the first name on the party list, and not Candidate P of the same party, whom the voter likes more. This is worst-case scenario. In other cases, perhaps both Candidate M and P will be elected or neither of them, or perhaps the voter likes Candidate M, the first name on this or her preferred party's party list just fine.
But STV eliminates the possibility of that worst-case scenario occurring. A voter votes for a specific candidate he or she wants to be elected (and thus for the party the candidate stands for) and marks back-up preferences as well if he or she chooses to ensure that to that extent his or her vote has best chance of being used to elect someone the voter favours, even if not the voter's first choice.
Where the voters' vote goes is determined by the voter and only by the voter - whether it will be used to elect someone is up to the relative popularity of the candidates and to the number of seats in the district.
It might be said "in PR-STV, vote transfers plus variation from constituency to constituency improve proportionality considerably...." I don't see how variation from constituency to constituency assists proportionality - if each district produces representation that is proportional, I don't see how having variation from district to district will help overall proportionality. Looking at overall proportionality may not be that useful anyway except as crude measure of dis-proportionality or as cause for complaint when a party with majority support takes majority government and total power or almost total power..- Does a NDP elected in downtown Toronto reflect the needs of a Liberal-voting dirt farmer in Saskatchewan? Does a Liberal elected in downtown Montreal reflect the needs of a Liberal-minded businessman in BC? Perhaps, perhaps not, at least not as much as a more regionally-based system would ensure. One thing that seems important is to use odd number of seats in an district to ensure most proportional district representation - where one party takes just a slight majority that is easier to show by giving the party four seats in a 7-seat district while the rest take three than giving that party five seats and the rest only three in an 8-seat district. Hope at least some of that was useful. =======================
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