[EM] STV's rejection: it's "not a defect, it's a feature!"

[Bart Ingles]

David Catchpole wrote:
> 
> [...]  the system is
> "FPP" such that a voter marks as many candidates as there are to be
> elected and the election is determined on aggregate marks. My local
> authority, Redcliffe, has the latter system (blerrk) with 8 councillors,
> and is being contested (the council, that is) by two major teams of 8
> (More-or-less-the-present-council = conservative vs. left team) and
> 10 (other...) independents (loonies...). The left
> team was organised about 9 months ago (with some cajolling from me hupf
> hupf :<}| ) and is somewhat of an experiment for us. Previous attempts
> have involved standing only 5 candidates-we got routed. The idea this time
> is to ensure that our vote is not split. Candidate and voter strategy is
> very, very important. Notice the similarity to approval...

This sounds like the block voting method used in most U.S. city
council-type elections.  I can see how the vote would be split by three
or more factions contesting for all of the seats (because voters are
limited to 8 choices), and I can see how running more than 8 candidates
could cause an individual group to split its vote, but how would
standing only 5 candidates cause the vote to be split?

Incidentally, where the block vote method has been replaced recently in
various U.S. jurisdictions, the only approaches that have been
successfully enacted are single-seat districts and cumulative voting. 
As an example, in San Francisco a few years back there were two
referenda on the ballot, one to adopt STV (which lost), and the other to
switch to single-seat districts using plurality/runoff (which won).  A
later attempt, pushed by the CVD and its local subsidiaries, to adopt
IRV for those districts never made it onto the ballot.  I wonder what
would have happened if CVD had pushed for cumulative voting instead of
STV in the first place.

In the U.S., STV is used New York City school board elections, where it
seems fairly unpopular, and in Cambridge city and county council
elections.  All recent attempts to adopt it elsewhere have failed.  But
there are probably dozens of school boards and town councils who have
adopted cumulative voting over the past 10 years, apparently with no
major complaints despite the method's known limitations.