2023/06/29 by David McCune, McCune, David, Erin Martin +5
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Economic and Environmental Valuation #FOS: Economics and business #Game Theory and Voting Systems #General Economics (econ.GN)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.17341
openalex publication_date 2023/06/29 · openalex created_date 2023/07/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The methods of single transferable vote (STV) and sequential ranked-choice voting (RCV) are different methods for electing a set of winners in multiwinner elections. STV is a classical voting method that has been widely used internationally for many years. By contrast, sequential RCV has rarely been used, and only recently has seen an increase in usage as several cities in Utah have adopted the method to elect city council members. We use Monte Carlo simulations and a large database of real-world ranked-choice elections to investigate the behavior of sequential RCV by comparing it to STV. Our general finding is that sequential RCV often produces different winner sets than STV. Furthermore, sequential RCV is best understood as an excellence-based method which will not produce proportional results, often at the expense of minority interests.