Fw: Voting system terminology

[jlau...@comcast.net]

_________________
Josiah Lee Auspitz
17 Chapel Street 

Somerville, MA 02144 

Landline phone: 617-628-6228 fax: 617-628-9441

Phones do not receive text messages

---

From: jlau...@comcast.net <jlau...@comcast.net>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2026 6:13 PM
To: Christopher Beland <bel...@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Voting system terminology

Thanks for sending the links, Chris.

I used to follow and even contribute to the social choice literature and am happy to have a refresher course.  

I think, however, that our little DSNC with its 166 votes, should focus on what is appropriate to its peculiar system, which calls for guaranteed representation from four categories: renters, homeowners, businesses, workers.  These are the only categories for which "proportionality" is even arguably relevant.

The wikipedia entry you provide makes it very clear, in one of its rare simple declarative sentences,  that "STV uses preferential ballots." The absence of the term ''preferential'' from by-laws 4-6 on Voting Methods is a mistake. 

 

The sense in which the STV system is thought to be "proportional" is that its effect will approximate PR, not that it is in itself a proportional voting method. I am aware that there is confusion on this point in much of the social choice literature.  

BEGIN QUOTE from wikipedia

"The key to STV's approximation of proportionality  [my emphasis] is that each voter effectively only casts a single vote in a district contest electing multiple winners, while the ranked ballots (and sufficiently large districts) allow the results to achieve a high degree of proportionality with respect to partisan affiliation within the district, as well as representation by gender and other descriptive characteristics." END QUOTE

The claim here is that the preferential ballots under STV will better approximate a proportional result than any system (whether simple ranked choice voting or first-past-the-post voting) where voters have x first place votes for x offices.  The question "proportional to what?" is answered with catchall categories that the DSNC has chosen to ignore.

So I do not think it overly pedantic to insist that the word 'preferential' be used to describe the actual ballots in the STV voting method and that the term 'proportional' be used only in the context of a desired, but not guaranteed outcome.

If we had full confidence that STV would indeed give due weight to the four categories singled out for special treatment-- renters, workers, businesses, homeowners--there would be no need to set quotas for them.  

You accurately describe me as advocating that DSNC employ the method of 'x votes for x offices' used in the City of Somerville for electing Councilors-at-Large.  This is, among other reasons, because every Somerville voter is familiar with it.  

A historical note that is missing from the wikipedia entries: the first person to advocate proportional voting at a major US political party convention was Melusina Fay Peirce at the Democratic National Convention of 1872 in Louisville, Kentucky. She wished to counter the pattern of immigrant bloc voting that would, she feared, enable Irish politicians to dominate city governments with 35-40% of the vote.  Her proposed system, the mathematics for which was vetted by her husband, Charles Sanders Peirce,  took root posthumously in her hometown: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lee

_________________
Josiah Lee Auspitz
17 Chapel Street 

Somerville, MA 02144 

Landline phone: 617-628-6228 fax: 617-628-9441

Phones do not receive text messages

---

From: Christopher Beland <bel...@alum.mit.edu>Sent: Monday, February 23, 2026 3:57 AM
To: Josiah Lee Auspitz <jlau...@comcast.net>
Subject: Voting system terminology

I was a bit confused the other day when I heard you insist that "proportional representation" was incorrect terminology for the single transferable vote system, and "preferential" was more correct. STV is one of the major ways to implement proportional representation and is kind of the whole point of the system; as you can read here, "proportional representation by single transferable vote" is actually a synonym for STV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

Academic papers also consider STV to be a system for achieving proportional representation:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.9.1.27

As far as I can tell, "preferential voting" refers to any ranked-choice system, including STV, instant runoff voting, and others. So it seems STV is both "proportional" and "preferential."

I know you prefer the "vote for X candidates for X seats" system; that's fine. I just thought it would be helpful to clarify terminology so when we discuss voting systems, we know what we're trying to say to each other.

I also heard you ask "proportional to what?" The general idea in PR is that voters who favor the same set of candidates should be represented proportional to their voting strength (the number of voters compared to all votes cast). Many proportional representation systems are designed to work with political parties, where the lines between groups of candidate and between groups of voters are clear, party boundaries. For example, in simple closed-list proportional representation, the number of seats held by a party is proportional to the number of voters who picked that party, and candidates are simply drawn from a list pre-determined by party officials. Open-list proportional representation does the same but lets voters influence the order of candidates from their selected party are seated.

Single transferable vote is a way to do proportional representation without political parties, so voters don't need to declare an affiliation, or be limited to any subset of candidates. Where a cluster of voters highly rank the same subset of candidates, STV seats none or some or all of those candidates in proportion to the size of the voter cluster. If voters' preferences are random and not clustered, I think it would be fair to say that STV isn't proportional to anything in particular, and it just becomes a way to elect generally highly-ranked candidates without a big spoiler effect.

If you want to know more about the different types of proportional representation and where in the world they are used, there's a good overview at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

-B.

[Mieke Citroen]

Thanks for that historical footnote. Why don't you share that on Wikipedia? That's what it's for! 

--Mieke 

--
Davis Square Neighborhood Council · https://DavisSquareNC.org · https://linktr.ee/DavisSquareNC
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Davis Square Neighborhood Council" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to davissquaren...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/davissquarenc/DS2PR07MB11716047AEFD0582D8F13503DA677A%40DS2PR07MB11716.namprd07.prod.outlook.com.