Alternative voting methods
How to use Belenios for preferential or
score voting?
By default, in Belenios, the voter can select some number of candidates among a list, for example, they can select between 3 and 5 candidates among a list of 10 candidates, or vote blank, if blank is allowed. In order to accommodate a larger set of voting methods, Belenios now supports elections where the voters can give an order of preference or a grade to candidates. Three counting methods are supported for the moment, each of them with a dedicated voting interface for the voter:
- guidelines for Condorcet, where voters rank candidates (possible with equalities). A Condorcet winner is a candidate that is preferred over all the other candidates. Several techniques exist to decide which candidate to elect when there is no Condorcet winner. We use here the Schulze method and we refer readers to the Wikipedia page for more information.
- guidelines for Single Transferable Vote (STV), where voters also rank candidates (without equalities). When a candidate obtains enough votes to be elected, the votes are transferred to the next candidate in the voter ballot, with a coefficient proportional to the "surplus" of votes. More information can be found here. Many variants of STV exist, we documented our choices in our code of STV.
- guidelines for Majority Judgment, where voters give a grade (Excellent, Very Good, etc.) to each candidate. The winner is the candidate with the highest median (or the 2nd highest median if there is a tie, etc.). More information can be found here.