Electing More Than One Winner
When a race has more than one seat, BetterVoting asks you a second question: Basic or Proportional. The difference matters!
The one-sentence version: Basic elects the strongest winners; Proportional elects a representative mix. They routinely produce completely different sets of winners from identical ballots.
What each one does
Basic Multi-Winner elects the first winner exactly as a single-winner race would, then repeats the whole process for the next seat, and again, until every seat is full.
Proportional Multi-Winner works out a quota — roughly, how many supporters a candidate needs to earn one seat — and fills seats so that any group large enough to meet that quota wins one.
Why the difference is not subtle
Imagine a club of 100 members electing 3 board seats. 60 members share one outlook; 40 share another.
Under Basic, the 60-member group is the majority in every single seat election. They can win the first seat, then the second, then the third. A 60% group can take 100% of the seats, and nothing has gone wrong — that’s the method working as designed.
Under Proportional, the 40-member group is comfortably more than one third of the electorate, so they meet the quota for a seat. The likely outcome is 2 seats to the larger group and 1 to the smaller.
Same ballots. Same voters. Different boards.
Which should you pick?
Ask what the seats are for.
Basic fits when the seats are interchangeable and you want the best occupants:
- a hiring committee choosing three finalists to interview
- picking the five best submissions to a competition
- electing officers where each seat should go to whoever has the broadest support
- any case where you’d be pleased if one faction’s candidates were simply the strongest
Proportional fits when the body is meant to represent the people voting for it:
- a board or council representing a membership
- a steering committee meant to reflect the different groups in an organisation
- any case where a group being persistently outvoted and getting no seats at all would be a failure
Which methods support which
| Basic | Proportional | |
|---|---|---|
| STAR Voting | ✓ | via Proportional STAR |
| Approval Voting | ✓ | |
| Ranked Robin | ✓ | |
| Ranked Choice Voting | ✓ | via Single Transferable Vote |
| Choose One | ✓ |
Proportional representation has its own two methods rather than being a switch on the others: Proportional STAR if you want a scored ballot, STV if you want a ranked one. The ballot your voters fill in is the same as the single-winner version — only the counting changes.