One critic managed to attack STV on this ground (“if you are filling five seats, you would naturally expect to get five votes”) in the very same monograph as s/he supported MMP on the ground it was much more proportional than STV. (Even though MMP, with only 1/498 as many votes as seats, offends against this supposed natural right even more egregiously than does STV, which allows 1/5 or 1/7 as many votes as seats).

In addition, STV allows you to support far more candidates than “one-X-per-seat” MNTV does. Approval, like STV, lets you support as many candidates as you like*** and put a particularly detested individual last, but doesn’t let you show gradations of preference: Churchill, de Gaulle and Stalin all get an equal tick if you want to keep Hitler out.

* In the UK/ US sense, not the Canadian. I understand that JK Rowling’s insistence that her Harry Potter books be unchanged for the North American edition led to some raised eyebrows among Canadians with sentences such as “Mrs Weasley was hoovering when they arrived”…

** MSS doesn’t like my using “block vote” for this method. But if MNTV can include Limited Vote (other than SNTV), then it logically also includes Approval, and we need a more specific term. “Maximum-one-X-per-seat” for the US/ UK version, “Exactly-one-X-per-seat” for the Australian variant (well, technically one numbers X candidates, but same mechanics).

*** Assuming no excrescences such as the Australian “number every candidate” rule.

MNTV, for the uninitiated, means Multiple Non-Transferable Votes, hence any system in which the voter may cast some number of votes greater than 1, and the winners are the M with the highest personal vote totals.

In my general use of the term, I also typically restrict it to systems where it is also the case that M>1, and the maximum number of votes is capped somewhere between 2 and M. However, I agree with Tom’s point that Approval Vote also belongs to the same category: multiple votes, M=1, winner is candidate with the most votes.

Sorry to interrupt; carry on with your checks and balances.

Point of terminology. As a matter of selling PR, I try not to frame it as “a single vote” vs “as many votes as there are seats to be filled” (for MNTV) or “as there are candidates” (for Approval). Viewed correctly, STV gives the voter a huge number of points (eg, 10 million in an Australian Senate election, because calculations of transfer values are taken to the eighth decimal place) with no restriction on how they can be cumulated or dispersed among the candidates, as long as it helps elect as many as possible of your highest-preferred candidates. Same for List-PR as long as your preference order is compatible with one of the pre-registered party lists (whether candidates are ranked according to position on the list, personal votes received, or some combination of the two).

Viewed in this light, if both STV and MNTV give you 10,000,000 points in a five-seat election (List-PR being functionally the same as STV, and Approval functionally the same as MNTV, for present purposes), then MNTV only allows you to give 2,000,000 points – no more, no fewer – to any given candidate, and if you vote for only (say) three candidates, then you’ve thrown away 4,000,000 of your points for nothing. By contrast, STV ensures that if you need to, you can cumulate all ten million of your points on your most-preferred viable candidate to help them get elected.

(Cumulative, taking this further, is better than MNTV but worse than STV: it enables you to give either 2 million, 4 million, 6 million, 8 million or 10 million points to a particular candidate, but this may be too many or too few to maximise your preference satisfaction in a particular election).

One thing, though: I fight against the notion all the time that cumulative vote is PR. It’s not. Of course, it’s still better than giving voters as many votes (or ballots!) as there are seats to fill.

I want to get a resolution in the State Grange about tweaking the diking district elections. The law needs to have a cumulative component – a voter should get up to 39 votes, and distribute them how they wish on any of the three board seats.

In an election in our district a couple of years ago, the whole board were on the ballots. (Yes ballots – as the county gives each voter as many as they’re entitled to, up to 40!) Serving on the board is a volunteer job where county commissioners would usually have to fill by appointment. There are contentious issues in Grays River, WA over salmon recovery and other things. Anyway, the county finally treated all the seats as vacancy appointments and that led to each of the three commission seats drawing a challenger in the filing period.

Our Grange had six votes – two for each seat. The Grange can’t endorse candidates, but because of this unique law, we wanted to meet our civic duty and vote. So we had a secret ballot election within our group where the secretary and one other person were sworn to secrecy. They counted the ballots and went to vote. I have no idea how the Grange voted, but we had a good turnout for our internal election. (The yummy meal drew many!)

The appointed incumbents swept the election. This was a faction in the community that arose from the issues mentioned. The other faction, who stood the challengers, lost all three head-to-head contests.

I did some math and figured that under a CV method, the losing faction would have won a seat if they had stood one candidate. That means the majority in the district would have still won the board, but the minority would be at the table. Things are polarized and including the other side, would be positive. I believe this because there are good people among both and there’s something to be said about facing each other in a formal setting.

But even with putting the warm and fuzzy aside, there are a lot of people who lost that pay taxes into the district and are subject to the rule of the board. Don’t they deserve a voice? That’s a basic notion of PR.

I am going to look into the Tulane ruling as part of the package for the resolution as people need to see this kind of weighted voting is indeed constitutional. Is there a link to the decision?

I suppose the extension of this logic is that a State legislature, or even a city council, with general power to legislate over most matters of life within its borders has to be one person, one vote, since (say) even if A uses much more irrigation water than B, B may well have more children than A, etc etc, so the inequalities cancel out (or become so blurred as to be un-administrable). But even then it’s usually considered tolerable – not necessarily ideal, but not morally comparable to Jim Crow either – to deny the vote to non-citizens, especially those not permanent residents. When I visited DC for a week, I had some definite opinions about its public transport system, but my stake in the matter was not (I’d agree myself) enough to entitle me to a vote for the DC council.

And now that’s a second reason to associate “children, money and water” with Mr Novoselic.

(Hope you will visit often.)

Ballots are distributed according to how much land the taxpayer owns. Every property owner in the district is granted two votes. Then, according to RCW 85.08.025 – “Each qualified voter of a diking improvement or drainage improvement district who owns more than ten acres of land within the district shall be entitled to two additional votes for each ten acres or major fraction thereof located within the district, up to a maximum total of forty votes for any voter, or in the case of community property, a maximum total of twenty votes per member of the marital community.”

A corporation, partnership, family trust or government entity can also vote. They need to designate a “natural person” to cast their ballots.

This type of election conjures two prominent phrases from the American vernacular. One might think that weighted ballots are a violation of One Person, One Vote. Another might believe the system protects against Taxation Without Representation. Each is seeking Equal Protection and what you think is fair can be a matter of your own self-interest. 

As late as the mid-1980s one would read law reports referring to “the prosecutrix”.