In the main video, I went through a couple of quick little examples of STV elections,

but in this extra video, I want to take a bigger election and go through it in a little bit more depth

so that you can see how an STV election unfolds.

In this case, we are going to have 10 candidates, and there are going to be 5 seats for representative open,

so that means each candidate needs to get 20% to win.

So citizens go off to the polls and their first choice results come in as follows.

Tarsier gets 5%, Gorilla gets 32%, Silverback gets 3%, owl gets 33%, turtle gets one, snake gets one,

Tiger gets 16, Lynx gets four,

Jackalope gets two, and Buffalo gets three.

Now what we can see here is a situation that is very often the case in real elections with STV,

that there are two or three parties with a lot of support, in this case,

Gorilla, Owl, and Tiger, and there are a bunch of parties that have less than 5% of the vote.

So let's see how this works out. First, Gorilla and Owl get awarded the seats because they have both crossed the threshold required to win.

Both candidates have more votes than they actually needed to get in, which means they have more support among the population than just their one candidate can provide.

So you take a look at which candidate has the biggest surplus of votes first and redistribute the

so owl has 32% she has the biggest surplus. Her voters second choice is the most important thing to figure out and in this case it is turtle.

Next up gorilla has a surplus of votes. Now up until this point we've been pretending that all citizens in the animal kingdom vote in exactly the same way.

But in real elections, voters don't all agree on what their second choice is.

And so guerrilla voters, it turns out, are split between Tarsier and Silverback for their second choice.

There are very many ways to try to resolve this situation of what happens when second choice votes are split.

But to simplify a little bit, we can just say that the votes are distributed proportionally.

So in this case, two to one, voters like Silverback over Tarsier as their second choice.

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