[EM] electing a variable number of seats

[Michael Rouse]

Do you need to give everyone on the board identical voting power? If 
not, a proxy method (where each board member's voting power is directly 
related to how many votes he or she received) might work. Candidate A 
might have twice the voting power of Candidate B, who might have 30 
percent more voting power than C. (You would need more than 3 seats on 
the board, though -- if there isn't a candidate with a majority, the 
effective voting power of the three members would be the same, since it 
would take at least two members of the group to pass something.) There 
wouldn't be a fixed number of seats,  since the number above the cutoff 
could vary.

You could count first-place votes, and only look at rankings if a 
candidate didn't reach a certain threshold and was dropped, and you 
needed to transfer the votes to second choices above the threshold. 
Allowing the individual power to vary with votes received also gives a 
natural hierarchy among members.

Mike Rouse

On 2/16/2011 7:38 PM, Charlie DeTar wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I'm on the board of a small non-profit, and have been tasked with
> revising the portion of the bylaws that defines how to elect the board
> of directors.  Having had some exposure to better election methods
> through a colleague, I'm interested in exploring how we might use a
> ranked voting system effectively.  Most of the methods I've seen,
> however, are intended for electing a single winner -- and for the board
> of directors, we have multiple seats.  Additionally, the number of seats
> is variable.
>
> I'm looking for methods that would more or less "optimally" (by variable
> definitions of optimal) elect a variable number of people.  "Single
> Transferable Vote" seems to be the most talked-about multi-winner ranked
> system; but the vote transfer process requires a pre-defined number of
> seats to fill.  It seems like the option to have a variable number of
> seats opens up possibilities for improving representation by adding a
> winner, or eliminating polarizing candidates by removing one.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> best,
> Charlie
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