This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Single transferable vote is built to solve a problem that simple plurality voting cannot: how to elect several representatives from one district while still making sure that a voter's ballot counts for something even when their first choice candidate has no realistic chance, or already has more support than needed. Under STV, voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing just one. A candidate who reaches a set quota of first preference votes, the minimum share of the vote mathematically guaranteed to fill a seat, is elected outright, and any votes that candidate received beyond that quota, the surplus, are transferred onward to the voters' next preferences rather than being wasted on a candidate who already won. If no candidate reaches the quota, the lowest performing candidate is eliminated instead, and their votes transfer to whichever remaining candidate each ballot ranked next. The counting repeats, electing or eliminating one candidate at a time, until every seat in the district is filled. The effect is a form of proportional representation without party lists: rather than voters choosing a party and the party choosing its representatives, STV lets voters rank individual candidates, including candidates from the same party, directly against one another, while still tending to produce a result where the overall spread of seats roughly matches the spread of voter preferences. The system is used today to elect the national parliaments of Ireland and Malta, the Australian Senate and the state parliament of Tasmania, and local elections in Scotland and a number of American cities, each adopting some variant of the same underlying counting method.