Local Elections- STV

[HLBug]

Can someone please explain STV to me in the simplest way possible?!

Some things I don't understand:

• if you meet the 'quota' do you automatically get elected?
• how are votes 'scored'? Assume first preference is worth more than second preference etc etc etc...?
• if they stop counting your votes once you get to the quota, do your second preference votes get 'upgraded' to first preference votes? Surely not as this seems daft?
• is it better to only vote for those you actually want to see elected (e.g. 3 of 7 candidates on list) rather than score them all 1 - 7?
• what is the best way to vote strategically?

I'm a fairly intelligent person, but just can't seem to get my head around it!!

It does make so much more sense for local elections to have nothing to do with party politics. The issues are rarely the same. As a Kiwi I find it very difficult to get my head around.

I was pleasantly surprised by how many people were voting when we went yesterday.

Turnout was 45 % mark where we are. That seems high?

Turnout was up on 2012.

We had absolutely nothing put through the door and we normally get a lot. It was strange.

The polling station was dead. I'm surprised the turnout is up, because a lot of people really are apathetic about voting again.

We definitely got leaflets from Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems. I don't recall seeing Green or SNP but possibly husband saw them first and put them straight into recycling.

I voted Conservative 1, Labour 2 and Lib Dem 3 , didn't vote for the others. Our station was still busy at 9 p.m

My vote had absolutely nothing to do with local issues.

I had leaflets from everyone. Mostly from the tories though those mainly came in the form of personally addressed letters to DH. He was quite bemused about that though since he has never previously voted for them. We only got one from the SNp that's probably because I've previously told them to fuck off go away.

The SNP one was pretending to be a newspaper with all the stories being about how great they were or how terrible everyone else is - it was called "The thistle" or some such. Obviously it's impossible to be scottish without being an SNP supporter....

So once someone reaches the quota and they allocate out the surplus....How do they decide which votes constitute the surplus? How do they know that those surplus votes represent the full population? Or do they not take that in to consideration? Still baffled!

That's when the computers get involved. If (say) there were 1,000 votes over a quota of 3,000 then the 2nd choices to be transferred would be worth 1/3 each (1,000/3,000). If there were only 500 excess votes, they'd only be worth 500/3,000. Or something like that