[maemo-community] STV voting strategy

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Dave Neary wrote:
> Jaffa's surplus of 21 transferred: Tim +8, Andrea +1, anidel +1, Jamie
> +2, Kees +3, sjgadsby +3, qole +3
> 
> GA's surplus of 14 transferred: Andrea +1, Jamie +2, anidel +1, Kees +3,
> sjgadsby +3, qole +3 (Tim was elected at that stage)
> 
> So over 40% of the votes for Jaffa, and a third of the votes for GA got
> transferred, in proportion to the number of #2 votes for each of those
> candidates.

OK so how exactly surplus gets transferred? I thought it is random like 
described in
http://stv.sourceforge.net/votingmethods/random so it is not clear which 
  vote is considered as surplus and thus which #2 position vote counts. 
As I understood it maybe my vote for #1 was not considered as surplus of 
winning person so my #2 position does not count at all. Correct or not?


> So I disagree - strategically voting for another candidate than your
> favourite as #1 is not necessary to make your vote count. Your second
> preference will get taken into account if your favourite candidate has a
> surplus, or is eliminated.

I didn't mean you should vote for other than your #1. I just think that 
with ranking method the next positions have bigger effect so it really 
doesn't matter much if you put someone on first or second place (or rank 
them as 100 or 90 on 0-100 scale) when council has 5 members. With STV 
it is very significant since your one vote is counted really only for 
one person (and most likely the first one on the list if the candidate 
is popular).

Frantisek