[EM] electing a variable number of seats

[Brandon Wiley]

RRV is the Range Voting equivalent of STV: http://rangevoting.org/RRV.html

I implemented RRV as a Google Wave gadget back when a few people were using
that and did some test elections. In my limited experience with it I found
that RRV often gave the same results as simply ranking the candidates
according to their range voting score for the top candidates. So you can
possibly just use that as it's easier. I also spend a lot of time thinking
about ties and tie-breaking and implementing various tie-breaking methods
and this was also not very useful as ties didn't occur in the top spots for
which there were actually seats available. So my advice is to just use range
voting, take the top X total scores where X is the number of seats, and
specify in the bylaws how you want to handle ties as it's largely a matter
of preference since there is no clearly defined optimal choice in the case
of a tie.

While I think Range Voting would work great here, if for some reason it
doesn't go over (sometimes people think it seems complicated) then Approval
Voting would also be very easy to use. Again just rank candidates by number
of approvals and take the top X.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Charlie DeTar <cfd at media.mit.edu> 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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