Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 30, 2005

An example of the Single Transferable Voting system

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a preferential voting system designed to minimise wasted votes and provide proportional representation in multi-candidate elections while ensuring that votes are explicitly for candidates rather than party lists. STV voting systems achieve this by initially allocating an individual's vote to their most preferred candidate and then subsequently transferring unneeded or unused votes after candidates are either elected or eliminated according to the voter's stated preferences. STV is promoted as a proportional representation method in multi-party multi-seat elections. In Australia, it is known as the Hare-Clark Proportional method, while the same system with parties able to indicate preferences is called simply STV. When STV methods are applied to single-seat elections, they simplify to instant-runoff voting and have different proportionality implications for a similar ballot due to the existence of only one winner.

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