don warner saklad Bullet voting (voting for only one candidate) can provide strategic advantages in other at-large election systems, but there are no such advantages in the Cambridge system (single transferable vote - proportional representation, or just STV-PR for short). In all likelihood, you vote will stay with your #1 choice. It will only be transferred to a lower choice if you first choice has more votes than necessary to win a seat (and yours is one of the ballots randomly chosen to be transferred to reduce that candidate's votes to the election threshold) or if your first choice is defeated. In either case, the transferred ballot will then go to the next available preference. I generally tell people to express a preference only for those candidates you can stomach. If there's any candidate who your really can't stand, leave his line blank. Ballots generally end up with one of the top few choices anyway, so those really deep prefereces, e.g. #15, #16, etc. are relatively unimportant. Cambridge's system is relatively immune to strategic voting, though there are some voters who like to "game the system" by voting for fringe candidates just to know that their ballot was transferred one or several times. Not in Cambridge. Really, I swear. Don't game the system. There are better things to do on Election Day. If you want to go looking worldwide for more on this system, it's used in the Republic of Ireland and in several other places. - Robert Winters
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