Single transferable voting (STV) is a way to choose winners where people can vote for more than one person, like picking their favorite candies in a bag.
Imagine you and your friends are choosing which games to play at recess, and there are three games: tag, hide-and-seek, and jump rope. You get to pick two of them as your favorites. Everyone does the same. Then, we count all the votes, if one game gets the most picks, it wins. But if no game has enough picks to win on its own, we take the extra picks from that game and give them to someone else who was also picked. This keeps going until there are winners for all the games we want.
How It Works Like a Party
Think of STV like having a party where you get to choose your favorite guests, but if no one gets enough votes to be in the party, their votes go to another guest they liked next. That way, everyone gets a fair chance to be at the party, and the guests who are most popular end up being there.
This helps make sure that even if someone isn’t your first choice, they might still get picked because of the extra votes from others, like how sometimes your second favorite candy ends up in your bag just because it got some extra picks.
Examples
- Imagine a classroom election where students can vote for their top three favorite candidates, and the ones with the most votes win seats.
- In a school council, each student picks up to five people they like best, and the ones with the most support get elected.
- A group of friends are choosing a movie to watch, and everyone ranks their favorites, the most popular one gets picked.
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See also
- What is first-past-the-post?
- How Do Voting Systems Actually Work?
- How Can a Single Vote Change the Whole Election?
- How Can a Single Vote Change Everything?
- How Does a Single Vote Really Change an Election?