Electoral System: Single Transferable Vote

This is one of three separate pages about STV on this proportional representation site, highlighting the central role it has played, and does still play, in the effort to steer the US away from its winner-take-all dependency. The content you'll find here is largely about the workings of the system, including some fairly fine-grained mechanical analyses, but that's all part of what contributes to the fair and proportional results in an STV election: a majority of the voters electing a majority of the representatives, and a cohesive minority being able to elect representatives in proportion to the votes they win. For an overview of STV, including where it is used, and case histories, see STV in Electoral Systems.

Much of the material on this page comes from Cambridge, befitting the long use of STV/PR there, and the availability of digital ranking records since computerization in 1997. There's also information about implementation, as there are certain factors that must be addressed when considering new adoptions of STV/PR. Other material dates back to my early explorations of past use in my own city of Worcester, and information that could be used for future use there or elsewhere. See PR Cities for more historical overview on STV's twentieth century use.

STV/PR has gone by many names, including proportional ranked choice voting, used here occasionally as well.

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