Damian’s notes

Summary and explainers of voting systems by the Electoral Reform Society (based in the UK), with an emphasis on how Single Transferable Vote is their preferred option.

If you are in to voting reform and worry that STV is insufficiently elaborate, here is CPO-STV (Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes by the Single Transferable Vote), a fancier way of counting the votes designed to reduce the impact on the outcome of the order in which candidates are eliminated during the count.

The issue this is trying to address is that a candidate with lots of 2nd preference votes might be eliminated early because they lack 1st preferences, so a slightly less satisfactory compromise candidate gets elected instead.

OpaVote provides elections as a service: you can choose between a variety of counting systems including various flavors of STV. Small elections are free, otherwise they charge by usage (meaning number of voters and number of candidates).

A description in English and in Pascal of Meek’s method for counting an election using Single Transferable Vote. This differes from some methods in that fractional votes are transferred, which entails using a computer to tally the votes.