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The Bloc STAR ballot and the official definitions

One line: the ballot does not change when a race fills several seats — same 0–5 stars, same instructions, nothing to ration — and this page is the official voter-facing wording for a Bloc race, what each sentence of it actually commits to, and the naming rule that makes an unqualified "Multi-Winner STAR Voting" mean this method.

→ the ballot as a picture, and what BetterVoting's live one gets wrong: The Bloc STAR ballot · the count behind the instructions: Bloc STAR · every legal way to fill a STAR ballot in: The STAR Ballot · running one on paper: Running a paper-ballot demo

Level: 201 · for voters

The official ballot text — which exists in two versions

There are two Equal Vote wordings in circulation, and they are not identical. Start with the one that has standing.

The normative text — STAR Voting Technical Specifications v1.3 (published 2024-12-20), §3.b–3.d. The specification requires the instructions and the method explanation to be printed on the ballot (§3.a), and prescribes them:

§3.b — voting instructions, near the top of the ballot or of the STAR section: * Give your favorite candidate five stars. * Give your last choice zero stars or leave them blank. * Equal scores are allowed. * Score other candidates as desired.

§3.c — multi-winner races state the number of winners above the race, not inside the instructions.

§3.d — the method explanation, multi-winner form: This election will use STAR Voting to elect x winners. In STAR Voting, the two highest scoring candidates are finalists and your vote goes to the finalist you prefer. The finalist preferred by the most voters wins. This process repeats until all seats have been filled.

The circulated text, from the paper-ballot guidance on docs.bettervoting.com and starvoting.org — this is the version most people have actually seen, and the one a demo ballot is usually cut from:

Bloc STAR Voting: Score - Then - Automatic - Runoffs.

Bloc STAR Voting elects majority preferred winners for multi-winner elections.

  • This election will elect X winners. Give your favorite five stars. Give your last choice zero or leave blank. Equal scores are allowed. Score other candidates as desired.
  • The two highest scoring candidates are finalists. Your full vote goes to the finalist you prefer. The candidate with the most votes is elected. This process repeats with remaining candidates until all seats are filled.

§3.e permits paraphrase and translation "as long as they are presented with the meaning unchanged", so the circulated version is licensed rather than off-spec. But the two bolded clauses are the one place the meaning is arguably not unchanged, and it is worth knowing which you are quoting:

specification §3.d circulated text
who wins a seat "the finalist preferred by the most voters wins" "the candidate with the most votes is elected"
the ballot goes to "your vote" "your full vote"
the winner count printed above the race (§3.c) folded into the first instruction

The first row is the one that matters. "The candidate with the most votes" invites a reader to think of stars as votes and conclude that the top scorer is elected — which is exactly what Bloc STAR does not guarantee (the score leader can win no seat). The specification's "the finalist preferred by the most voters" closes that door: it names the field (the two finalists) and the currency (voters preferring, not stars). If you are printing one of these on a real ballot, print the specification's.

Both are Equal Vote's own materials, which is what makes them authoritative for this method's own ballot language — and worth reading with the lean in mind for anything evaluative.

One thing to notice about either version before the line-by-line: it states the count on the ballot itself, in about four sentences, and needs no rationing rule, no "pick up to three", and no ranking discipline. Very few real-world ballots can describe their own tabulation in the space of the instructions.

What each sentence commits to

Walking the circulated version, since that is the one most readers will meet.

"This election will elect X winners." The seat count belongs on the ballot even though it changes nothing about how you mark it — the specification is emphatic enough about this to give it its own clause, §3.c, placing the number above the race rather than inside the instructions. That is the point: under SNTV or block plurality the seat count is your marking rule — three seats, three marks — so a voter arriving from those methods will look for the rule and needs to be told there isn't one.

"Give your favorite five stars. Give your last choice zero or leave blank." Identical to single-winner STAR. Blank scores as zero for the totals; where blank and 0 genuinely differ is in what the ballot is understood to say, which is abstention vs. zero vs. NOTA.

"Equal scores are allowed." No ranking to satisfy, so two candidates can share a 5 or share a 0. When two candidates you scored equally meet in a runoff, your ballot lands in Equal Support — that means "I don't tip this particular matchup", not "my ballot was discounted"; your scores already did full work choosing the finalists (the long answer).

"The two highest scoring candidates are finalists. Your full vote goes to the finalist you prefer." Full vote is the load-bearing word: the automatic runoff is one voter, one vote, no matter how big the gap between your two scores. A 5-vs-4 preference pushes exactly as hard as 5-vs-0.

"The candidate with the most votes is elected." The one sentence that misleads if read quickly: "votes" here means runoff preferences, not stars. The candidate with the most stars is not necessarily elected, and in a multi-seat race the point leader can be shut out of every seat — the score leader can win no seat. This is the clause the specification words differently and better (§3.d: the finalist preferred by the most voters wins), which is the argument for printing the specification's text rather than this one.

"This process repeats with remaining candidates until all seats are filled." The removal step, and the whole of the multi-winner machinery, in eleven words. "Remaining candidates" is doing quiet work: the ballots don't change between seats, the field does. Nothing is spent, reweighted, or transferred — that is STAR-PR's job, and the reason the two methods answer different questions.

What it is called, and by whom

Where The name Notes
Technical specifications §1.c Bloc STAR Voting, aka Basic Multi-Winner STAR Voting "conducted by repeating the STAR Voting process until all seats have been filled, as described in section 2.c"
Technical specifications §1.e Multi-Winner STAR Voting may mean bloc or proportional — but unless otherwise specified it should be assumed to refer to Bloc STAR Voting
Technical specifications §2.c (the procedure) seats are filled as in single-winner STAR, "with an additional Automatic Runoff round conducted for each seat up for election"
BetterVoting, race setup Basic Multi-Winner the STAR ballot with more than one winner
BetterVoting, stored data votingMethod: "STAR" + num_winners the name "Bloc STAR" is never written down — it is implied by ballot + seat count (BV129 note)
This library voting_method: Bloc STAR aliases bloc, bloc star; house style spells out the method

The §1.e default is the one to remember. "Multi-Winner STAR Voting" in a bylaw, a press release, or a ballot measure means Bloc unless the document says proportional — so a body that meant to adopt proportional representation and wrote "multi-winner STAR" has, on the published specification, adopted the majoritarian method instead.

§2.c is worth a second look too, because it sounds like it under-describes the method: it adds only "an additional Automatic Runoff round … for each seat", saying nothing about re-running the scoring round. That terseness is defensible, and for the reason Bloc STAR gives — the removal step leaves every remaining candidate's total untouched, so the score order is fixed for the whole election and the scoring round is in effect decided once. What genuinely repeats per seat is the runoff, which is what the specification says. It is a compressed description, not a wrong one.

(Citations here are from v1.3, published 2024-12-20, which starvoting.org/technical_specifications serves as a scanned PDF — no text layer, so the section numbers above were read out of the file rather than copied from a web page. If a later version renumbers, this table is what to re-check.)

Filling it out well

The advice is the same as single-winner STAR, because the ballot is: score honestly. Favorites at 5, the candidates you least want at 0 or blank, and the scores in between carrying both your order of preference and how strongly you support each one.

The one tactic that specifically backfires in a multi-seat race is padding the top score to the seat count. If nine seats are up, giving five stars to nine candidates does not hand you nine votes — it surrenders your say in which of those nine win and in what order the seats fill, because your ballot registers Equal Support in every runoff among them. If you would honestly be content with any of the nine, that is an honest ballot and a good one. If you have favorites among them, score the favorites highest and give the others the number of stars you actually think they deserve.

Two supports for that, from different directions: Over 50% shows how little a unanimous majority buys when it is unanimous about a candidate rather than a slate, and honest limits is candid about the opposite pressure — a cohesive slate scoring uniformly is a real strategy in this method, and it recurs once per seat. Neither changes the advice for an individual voter; both are worth knowing before recommending the method to a body.

The longer public version of this answer, written for a real 2021 multi-winner reorganization election, is the Multnomah County Democrats' STAR Voting FAQ — advocacy-adjacent, and the clearest thing published on how to vote in a Bloc race rather than how to count one.

See also