Cambridge, Massachusetts

The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts has used STV to elect its city council and school committee since 1941. The statute providing the counting rules is Chapter 54A of Massachusetts General Laws. Although this law was repealed by the legislature, any city implementing STV at that time was allowed to continue to do so. For a wealth of information on the Cambridge elections, see Robert Winter's website. In general terms, the following is the procedure for counting the votes:

1. Allocate all votes to their first choices.
2. Starting with the candidate with the greatest number of votes, transfer surplus votes to their next choices.
3. Starting with the candidate with the fewest number of votes, eliminate all candidates with fewer than 50 votes and transfer those votes to their next choices.
4. Eliminate the candidate with the fewest number of votes and transfer those votes to their next choices.
5. Repeat step 4, until sufficient candidates have reached the winning threshold.

Note that § 16(b) allows Cambridge to use any method for transferring surplus votes that was in use in 1938, and Cambridge has chosen to use the Cincinnati method. The City of Cambridge describes the Cincinnati method as follows: The ballots of the candidate who has a surplus are numbered sequentially in the order in which they have been counted (that is, in the sequence dictated by the random draw of precincts) and then every nth ballot is drawn and transferred to a continuing candidate until the original candidate is credited with ballots equaling no more than quota. n is nearest whole number computed by the formula

n = Candidate's Total Ballots Surplus Ballots.

A ballot selected by this method that does not show a preference for a continuing candidate is skipped and remains with the original candidate. If not enough ballots are removed when ballots n, 2n, 3n, .... have been transferred, the sequence starts again with n+1, 2n+1, 3n+1, ....