Ceorana Senate and House of Delegates elections

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A sample filled-out ballot

Elections for members of the Ceorana Senate and House of Delegates are a bit more complicated than those elections for other posts, because they are done using a single transferable vote system, contrary to the first-past-the-post system used for other Ceoranan elections and perhaps in a majority of real world nations. The voting is done in this way in order to maintain the two houses as more deliberative body and have as much minority representation as possible, but without using party lists, which are not suited to Ceorana's political climate of many various parties.

General method

The Senate has 100 at-large members while the House of Delegates has 20 members elected from each province. The delegates are elected in four year terms, so each area's delegation is broken up into five blocs: Class A, Class B, Class C and Class D, while Senators serve six-year terms, broken into Class α, Class β, Class γ, Class δ, Class ε and Class ζ, named after the letters in the Greek, rather than English, alphabet to avoid confusion. Within each class, there are four or sixteen/seventeen seats in the House of Delegates and Senate, respectively. This is where the single transferable vote comes in.

In the House of Delegates, since there are four seats up for election, four seats need to be filled. When voters receive their ballots, they are given a list of candidates, and mark their order of preference: first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice, etc. Voters are required to rank at least four candidates, but may rank any or all beyond that.

When the votes are tallied, all of the preferences are stored by way of computer. The Droop quota is calculated. Any candidate who has more first-choice votes than the quota is declared elected. Then, the rest of the choices of all the votes for that candidate are looked at, and percentages of votes for those choices that also voted for the first choice are determined. Then, the quota is put together with proportions of other choices that match the total proportions of other choices. The remaining votes that weren't counted into the quota are thrown back into the pool, the ones used for electing the first choice are kept, and the process starts all over again, assuming another candidate is at quota. If not, the candidate with the lowest number of first-choice votes at this stage is eliminated, and all of the votes for them are distributed to other candidates. Dropping the lowest candidate repeats until another candidate reaches quota.

Senate elections are calculated in much the same way, except that there are either sixteen or seventeen seats per group instead of just four.

See also