I was recently asked about which electoral mechanism I would recommend with two posts empty and four candidates running, to ensure that the successful candidates have the support of a majority of the voters.
The two empty posts first suggested to me Block Voting (where each voter would have two votes) but that does not ensure that successful candidates would have the support of a majority of the voters. For example under Block Voting Liberals took all five seats in Edmonton with less than a third of the votes in 1921.
So then I, like the United Farmers of Alberta in the early 1920s, turned from the Block Voting system to Single Transferable Voting. This ensured that to be elected in Edmonton when it was a five-member district, for example a candidate had to have support of one-sixth of the voters, either through first choice votes or through formed consensus through transferable votes.
However looking at this differently, with two posts such as Medicine Hat had in 1926, a successful candidate there needed the support of one-third of voters. This was because Alberta's STV system used the Droop quota, which used the number of empty posts plus one.
That is as long as voters rank all four of the candidates in this case. "Exhausted" ballots, those that don't have marked rankings to indicate required transfers, reduce the number of ballots in play, and cause waste of votes, and could allow a candidate to be elected by default without proven support of a majority of voters.
Otherwise, if time is not important, the same could be done with successive run-off elections, where voters must stay and vote for the whole process.
One way to this is to have voters cast two votes each time at first, with the least popular candidate being eliminated each round and then casting one vote after (or if) one post is filled if a candidate achieves a majority of the votes to fill a seat. Probably it will eventually come down to two candidates competing for the last empty seat, in which case one or the other would get a majority of the votes to take the last empty seat.
A different mechanism used in the early 1950s in BC for provincial elections to elect two MLAs in a district was to establish two separate elections in each district.
Candidates were divided into two separate ballots. A voter cast one vote in each.
For two-member districts there were two "ballots", identified by colour and letter. Each of the two "ballots" had a different candidate from each party. Each "ballot' elected one MLA, and voters were able to place one vote (plus later choices) in each "ballot." Thus was created what amounted to two separate single-member STV elections in the same district. In BC each party contributed one candidate in each ballot, but in the case of an organization such as asked about today, there (likely) are not political parties so how one would separate the candidates into two ballots escapes me.
So those are some ideas that come to my mind.
(revised in November 2019)
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