In the main video, I went through a couple of quick little examples of STV elections,
but in this extra video, I want to take a bigger election and go through it in a little bit more depth
so that you can see how an STV election unfolds.
In this case we are going to have 10 candidates, and there are going to be five seats for representative open.
So that means each candidate needs to get 20% to win.
So citizens go off to the polls and their first choice results come in as follows:
Tarsier gets 5%
Gorilla gets 32%
Silverback gets 3%
Owl gets 33%
Turtle gets 1%
Snake gets 1%
Tiger gets 16%
Lynx gets 4%
Jackelope gets 2%
and Buffalo gets 3%.
Now what we can see here is a situation that is very often the case in real elections with STV
That there are two or three parties with a lot of support
--in this case Gorilla, Owl, and Tiger--
and there are a bunch of parties that have less than 5% of the vote.
So let's see how this works out.
First, Gorilla and Owl get awarded a seat because they have both crossed the threshold required to win.
Both candidates have more votes than they actually needed to get in,
which means they have more support among the population than just their one candidate can provide.
You take a look at which candidate has the biggest surplus votes first and redistribute those.
Owl has 32%, she has the biggest surplus. Her voters' second choice is the most important thing to figure out
and in this case it is Turtle.
Next up, Gorilla has a surplus of votes.
Now, up until this point we've been pretending that all citizens in the animal kingdom vote in exactly the same way.
But in real elections, voters don't all agree on what their second choice is.
So Gorilla voters, it turns out, are split between Tarsier and Silverback for their second choice.
There are very many ways to try to resolve this situation of what happens when second choice votes are split.
But to simplify a little bit, we can just say that those votes are distributed proportionally.
So in this case, 2-to-1 voters like Silverback over Tarsier as their second choice.
So that is how the votes get distributed, bumping Silverback up to 11% and Tarsier up to 9%.
At this point, nobody has a surplus of votes anymore and nobody's over the threshold, so we start eliminating the biggest loser first.
In this case, that is Snake. Snake was never going to win and so those votes go to Snake voters' second choice which is Turtle.
Next up, Jackelope is the biggest loser.
Now, what happens here is Jackelope voters only like Jackelope.
They don't like any other candidate. They think everybody else is equally bad and only Jackelope is awesome.
So they just put a one next to Jackelope on their voting ballot,
and nothing next to anybody else.
What happens in this situation is Jackelope votes are actually just removed from the election at this stage.
Their voters have said that they don't care if Jackelope doesn't win.
So it's almost like they didn't vote.
Next up, Buffalo is eliminated.
Now, his voters put Jackelope as second choice, but since Jackelope has been already eliminated,
his votes can't go there.
In STV it does matter that you're able to get a certain number of peoples' first choice vote.
Sometimes people criticize the system for that, but I don't think it's unreasonable
to consider that first choice votes matter more than other votes.
Since Buffalo voters can't move to their second choice 2/3rds of Buffalo voters don't care at this point
they wanted Buffalo or Jackelope and they don't like anybody else,
and 1/3rd of Buffalo voters back Turtle.
So Turtle has gotten another little slice of 1% bringing him up to 16% and tied with Tiger.
But, the next biggest loser is Lynx.
Lynx votes go to Tiger, and Tiger is selected as the next representative for reaching the voting threshold.
Next biggest loser is Tasier. Sorry Tarsier.
Tarsier at this stage has votes both from citizens who selected her as their first choice
and candidates who selected her as their second choice after Gorilla.
So when these votes are redistributed, some of them are going to their second choice
and some of them are going to their third choice.
But simians stick together, and so towards Silverback is where they go.
Silverback is elected as the next representative.
Finally, the question is what to do with Turtle.
Turtle is the next biggest loser and hasn't reached the threshold
but there are five seats open in this election.
The rule under most STV systems is that if you have one seat open, and you have one candidate remaining,
even if they didn't quite reach the threshold, they still get in.
And so Turtle is elected as our final representative.
If we jump back to the beginning, we can see that this has turned out to be a pretty good result.
Our biggest sections of the population were Gorilla and Owl
and they ended up getting both their first and second choices.
Tiger and Lynx were the next biggest sections of the population.
They got one of their choices.
A lot of parties agreed that they were OK with Turtle as their next choice,
and those votes prevented Turtle from getting eliminated in any particular round.
And so Turtle, too, is a representative.