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Sequential proportional approval voting (SPAV) or reweighted approval voting (RAV) [1] is an electoral system that extends the concept of approval voting to a multiple winner election. It is a simplified version of proportional approval voting. It is a special case of Thiele's voting rules, proposed by Danish statistician Thorvald N. Thiele in the early 1900s. [2] It was used (with adaptations for party lists) in Sweden from 1909-1921, when it was replaced by a cruder "party-list" style system as it was easier to calculate, [3] [4] and is still used for some local elections.
Sequential Proportional Approval Voting (SPAV) uses Approval Voting ballots to elect multiple winners equitably by selecting a candidate in each round and then reweighing the approvals for the subsequent rounds. [5]
Each ballot is assigned a value equal to the reciprocal of one more than the number of candidates approved on that ballot who have been designated as elected. Each ballot is counted at its current value as a vote for all continuing candidates approved on that ballot. The candidate with the most votes in the round is elected. The process continues until the number of elected candidates is equal to the number of seats to be filled. [6]
At each stage, the unelected candidate with the highest approval score is elected. Then the value of each voter’s ballot is set at where s is the number of candidates approved on that ballot who were already elected, until the required number of candidates is elected. This reweighting is based on the D'Hondt method (Jefferson method). Other weighting formulas such as Sainte-Lague method may be used while still being referred to as SPAV.
There is an incentive towards tactical voting where a voter may withhold approval from candidates who are likely to be elected in any case, as with cumulative voting and the single non-transferable vote.
It is a much computationally simpler algorithm than harmonic proportional approval voting, permitting votes to be counted either by hand or by computer, rather than requiring a computer to determine the outcome of all but the simplest elections. [7]
When comparing Sequential Proportional Approval Voting to Single Transferable Vote, SPAV is better at selecting more central candidates, that represent all the voters, where STV is better at mimicking the distribution of the voters. [8]
For this example, there is an election for a committee with 3 winners. There are six candidates from two main parties: A, B, and C from one party, and X, Y, and Z from another party. About 2/3 of the voters support the first party, and the other roughly 1/3 of the voters support the second party. Each voter casts their vote by selecting the candidates they support. The following table shows the results of the votes. Each row starts by saying how many voters voted in that way and marks each candidate that group of voters supported. The bottom row shows the number of votes each candidate received.
# of votes | Candidate A | Candidate B | Candidate C | Candidate X | Candidate Y | Candidate Z |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
112 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
6 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
73 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
1 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
Total Votes | 116 | 122 | 126 | 82 | 78 | 77 |
Because Candidate C has the most support, they are the first winner, w1, and their vote is not counted in later rounds. For the second round, anyone who voted for Candidate C has their vote counted as only 1/2. Below is the chart for round 2. A second column on the left has been added to indicate the weight of each ballot.
# of votes | Weight of Vote | Candidate A | Candidate B | Candidate C | Candidate X | Candidate Y | Candidate Z |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
112 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
6 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
4 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
73 | 1 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
4 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
1 | 1 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
Weighted Votes | 58 | 61 | 78 | 76 | 75 |
Despite Candidates A and B having so many votes in the first round, Candidate X is the second winner, w2, because not as many of the votes for Candidate X were halved. In round 3, anyone who voted for either Candidates C or X has their vote count 1/2, and anyone who voted for both has their vote count 1/3. If anyone had voted for neither, their vote would remain at 1. Below is that table.
# of votes | Weight of Vote | Candidate A | Candidate B | Candidate C | Candidate X | Candidate Y | Candidate Z |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
112 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
6 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
4 | 1/3 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
73 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
4 | 1/3 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
1 | 1/2 | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
Weighted Votes | 57 1/3 | 60 1/3 | 38 1/3 | 37 5/6 |
Candidate B is the third and final winner, w3. The final result has 2/3 winners from the party that had about 2/3 of the votes, and 1/3 winner from the party that had about 1/3 of the votes. If approval voting had been used instead, the final committee would be all three candidates from the first party, as they had the highest three vote totals without scaling.
Sequential-PAV satisfies the fairness property called justified representation whenever the committee size is at most 5, but might violate it when the committee size is at least 6. [9] [10]
SPAV is not precinct summable, and requires the ballot information to be centralized before a complete winner set can be determined.
Pareto efficiency | Committee monotonicity | Support monotonicity with additional voters | Support monotonicity without additional voters | Consistency | inclusion- strategyproofness | Computational complexity | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Approval voting | strong | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | P |
Proportional approval voting | strong | × | ✓ | cand | ✓ | × | NP-hard |
Sequential Proportional Approval Voting | × | ✓ | cand | cand | × | × | P |
Plurality voting refers to electoral systems in which the candidate in an electoral district who poll more than any other are elected.
Proportional representation (PR) refers to any type of electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to political divisions among voters. The essence of such systems is that all votes cast – or almost all votes cast – contribute to the result and are effectively used to help elect someone – not just a bare plurality or (exclusively) the majority – and that the system produces mixed, balanced representation reflecting how votes are cast. In the context of voting systems, PR means that each representative in an assembly is elected by a roughly equal number of voters. In the common case of electoral systems that only allow a choice of parties, the seats are allocated in proportion to the vote share each party receives.
The two-round system is a voting method used to elect a single winner. In the United States, it is often called a jungle or nonpartisan primary. The system can also be called runoff voting, though this term is sometimes used to refer to the closely-related exhaustive ballot and ranked-choice (instant-runoff), which tend to produce highly similar results.
The single transferable vote (STV), sometimes mistakenly conflated with proportional ranked choice voting (P-RCV), is a multi-winner electoral system in which each voter casts a single vote in the form of a ranked-choice ballot. Voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternative preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated or elected with surplus votes, so that their vote is used to elect someone they prefer over others in the running. STV aims to approach proportional representation based on votes cast in the district where it is used, so that each vote is worth about the same as another.
Voting is a method by which a group, such as a meeting or an electorate, convenes together for the purpose of making a collective decision or expressing an opinion usually following discussions, debates or election campaigns. Democracies elect holders of high office by voting. Residents of a jurisdiction represented by an elected official are called "constituents", and the constituents who choose to cast a ballot for their chosen candidate are called "voters." There are different systems for collecting votes, but while many of the systems used in decision-making can also be used as electoral systems, any which cater to proportional representation can only be used in elections.
The participation criterion, also called vote or population monotonicity, is a voting system criterion that says that a candidate should never lose an election as a result of receiving too many votes in support. More formally, it says that adding more voters who prefer Alice to Bob should not cause Alice to lose the election to Bob.
The single transferable vote (STV) is a semi-proportional representation system that elects multiple winners. It is one of several ways of choosing winners from ballots that rank candidates by preference. Under STV, an elector's vote is initially allocated to their first-ranked candidate. Candidates are elected (winners) if their vote tally reaches quota. After the winners in the first count are determined, if seats are still open, surplus votes — those in excess of an electoral quota— are transferred from winners to the remaining candidates (hopefuls) according to the surplus ballots' next usable back-up preference.
The Borda count electoral system can be combined with an instant-runoff procedure to create hybrid election methods that are called Nanson method and Baldwin method. Both methods are designed to satisfy the Condorcet criterion, and allow for incomplete ballots and equal rankings.
Instant-runoff voting (IRV), also known as ranked-choice voting or the alternative vote (AV), combines ranked voting together with a system for choosing winners from these rankings by repeatedly eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and reassigning their votes until only one candidate is left. It can be seen as a modified form of a runoff election or exhaustive ballot in which, after eliminating some candidates, the choice among the rest is made from already-given voter rankings rather than from a separate election. Many sources conflate this system of choosing winners with ranked-choice voting more generally, for which several other systems of choosing winners have also been used.
An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, non-profit organisations and informal organisations. These rules govern all aspects of the voting process: when elections occur, who is allowed to vote, who can stand as a candidate, how ballots are marked and cast, how the ballots are counted, how votes translate into the election outcome, limits on campaign spending, and other factors that can affect the result. Political electoral systems are defined by constitutions and electoral laws, are typically conducted by election commissions, and can use multiple types of elections for different offices.
Proportional approval voting (PAV) is a proportional electoral system for multiwinner elections. It is a multiwinner approval method that extends the highest averages method of apportionment commonly used to calculate apportionments for party-list proportional representation. However, PAV allows voters to support only the candidates they approve of, rather than being forced to approve or reject all candidates on a given party list.
Combinatorial participatory budgeting,also called indivisible participatory budgeting or budgeted social choice, is a problem in social choice. There are several candidate projects, each of which has a fixed costs. There is a fixed budget, that cannot cover all these projects. Each voter has different preferences regarding these projects. The goal is to find a budget-allocation - a subset of the projects, with total cost at most the budget, that will be funded. Combinatorial participatory budgeting is the most common form of participatory budgeting.
Justified representation (JR) is a criterion of fairness in multiwinner approval voting. It can be seen as an adaptation of the proportional representation criterion to approval voting.
Multiwinner approval voting, sometimes also called approval-based committee (ABC) voting, refers to a family of multi-winner electoral systems that use approval ballots. Each voter may select ("approve") any number of candidates, and multiple candidates are elected.
Multiwinner, at-large, or committeevoting refers to electoral systems that elect several candidates at once. Such methods can be used to elect parliaments or committees.
Phragmén's voting rules are rules for multiwinner voting. They allow voters to vote for individual candidates rather than parties, but still guarantee proportional representation. They were published by Lars Edvard Phragmén in French and Swedish between 1893 and 1899, and translated to English by Svante Janson in 2016.
The method of equal shares is a proportional method of counting ballots that applies to participatory budgeting, to committee elections, and to simultaneous public decisions. It can be used when the voters vote via approval ballots, ranked ballots or cardinal ballots. It works by dividing the available budget into equal parts that are assigned to each voter. The method is only allowed to use the budget share of a voter to implement projects that the voter voted for. It then repeatedly finds projects that can be afforded using the budget shares of the supporting voters. In contexts other than participatory budgeting, the method works by equally dividing an abstract budget of "voting power".
Multi-issue voting is a setting in which several issues have to be decided by voting. Multi-issue voting raises several considerations, that are not relevant in single-issue voting.
Fully proportional representation(FPR) is a property of multiwinner voting systems. It extends the property of proportional representation (PR) by requiring that the representation be based on the entire preferences of the voters, rather than on their first choice. Moreover, the requirement combines PR with the requirement of accountability - each voter knows exactly which elected candidate represents him, and each candidate knows exactly which voters he represents.
Thiele's voting rules are rules for multiwinner voting. They allow voters to vote for individual candidates rather than parties, but still guarantee proportional representation. They were published by Thorvald Thiele in Danish in 1895, and translated to English by Svante Janson in 2016. They were used in Swedish parliamentary elections to distribute seats within parties, and are still used in city council elections.
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