[EM] STV for small committees : some exceptions and questions.

[Hugo Harth]

STV for small committees : some exceptions and questions.

I appreciated very much the explanation of donald at mich.com to Moe St. 
EverGreen.
Thinking about the same subject, I would appreciate to hear some suggestions 
or clarifications about the possible exceptions with STV voting.
I hope I have got them all. If you see other exceptions, please tell.

1) Successors
Suppose a committee has been elected.
However, in case a member retires or deceases, a successor(s) has to be 
provided without new elections.

One way would be : For each candidate determine the successor by running STV 
on all the ballots but without this candidate.
Proceed in a similar way for the second and third successors : omit the 
candidate and the successors already determined.

This works but it is only practical with a computer.
What would be the way to proceed with manual counting?
To proceed with a second STV with all winning candidates removed?
It assumes that there enough candidates left to fill a board again...

2) Ranking exhausted
The rule might be : distribute this ballot over the demanding stacks 
proportional to their size.
What is proportional here? I would say, prior to the distribution of the 
(depleting) stack, not when the case occurs.
Splitting ballots is easy with a computer.
Manually, it would mean adding some (annotated, marked) ballots at this 
stage. The marking is necessary to allow a recount.


3) Multiple candidates in the same rank
For simplicity with manual counting, I would suggest to forbid ex-aequos.
It is thinkable however that STV may be adapted to cope with this.

4) Multiple equal piles to be distributed.
The rule would be : distribute them all. There might be curious (but benign) 
effects, suppose 5 piles, none has reached the quotum, 3 lowest piles are 
equal, 3 candidates have to be elected.
This would result in 2 piles exceeding the quotum, no 3rd pile left.
The 3rd pile has to be stacked up again.
Eventually however, all ranks might have been used and there might be still 
equal piles and more than the number of last places to be allocated.
What then? Think again of small committees. Select at random?

In small committee-elections, I believe I would suggest or require that all 
or a minimum number of the ranks would be used (with penalty of the ballot 
being excluded) to avoid exceptions.

yours sincerely,

Hugo Harth
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