Bloc STAR among the at-large methods¶

One line: Bloc STAR is one of several ways to fill N seats majoritarianly — alongside Block Plurality, Limited Voting, SNTV, Bloc Approval and Bloc Ranked Robin. They all answer "who does the majority most want?", and they differ in what the ballot lets you say and how badly a side is punished for running too many candidates.

→ The other half of the map: proportional methods · the fork itself: Electing more than one, simply · the mechanics here: Bloc STAR

Level: 201 · for voters

The family¶

Every method in this table fills N seats without any notion of a fair share. What separates them is the ballot, and one structural quirk of the count that only Bloc STAR has.

Method	Ballot	How the seats are filled	Vote-splitting risk
SNTV (single non-transferable vote)	mark 1 candidate	top N by first choices	severe
Limited Voting	mark k < N	top N by marks	high
Block Plurality (plurality-at-large)	mark N	top N by marks	moderate
Bloc Approval	mark any number	top N by approvals	low
Bloc Ranked Robin	rank them	top N by head-to-head record	none
Bloc STAR	score all 0–5	sequential: run STAR, seat the winner, remove, repeat	none

The plurality family — Block, Limited and SNTV — differs only in votes per voter, and that one dial slides the outcome from majority sweep (3:0) to minority-tops-the-poll (2:1 with the minority leading) on the same 60/40 electorate.

The structural difference: Bloc STAR is sequential¶

Look at the "how the seats are filled" column again. Five of the six methods produce one ranking of all candidates and cut it at N. Bloc STAR can't: STAR's second round is a head-to-head between exactly two finalists, and there is no way to read "the top four" out of a two-person runoff. So it has to elect one seat, remove that candidate, and run the whole count again.

Three things follow, and none of them are obvious from the family table:

Bloc STAR's result is a sequence, not a set. The winners come out in the order they were seated, and that order is meaningful — it says which seat a tie decided, and gives a rough strength ranking of the winners. Bloc Ranked Robin prints a seat order too, but there it's just the record table sorted.
The scoring round is only a shortlist. Since the runoff decides every seat, the point leader can be shut out entirely — see the score leader can win no seat. Under Bloc Approval or Block Plurality that is impossible by construction: the tally is the result.
A tie has somewhere to propagate to. Break a tie for seat 1 and you've changed which candidates remain for seat 2. In a top-N method a tie only ever swaps the last seat. See ties, seat by seat.

The property that separates it from SNTV: no vote splitting¶

This is the practical argument, and Food-Truck Row makes it in one table. One 100-voter electorate, two seats: a 57-voter savory majority running three trucks against a 43-voter sweet minority running two.

	first choices	SNTV	Bloc STAR	Bloc Ranked Robin	STAR-PR	STV
savory : sweet (57 : 43)		0 : 2	2 : 0	2 : 0	1 : 1	1 : 1

Under SNTV the 57% majority wins nothing: one non-transferable vote split three ways tops out at 20, behind both sweet trucks. The engine names it outright on the file:

[Vote-splitting check]
  Choose-One first choices: Donut 22, Eclair 21, Arepa 20, Bao 19, Churro 18
  Plurality winner: Donut (22, 22.0%)
  Bloc 'Savory' = Arepa, Bao, Churro: combined 57 (57.0%); winner Donut is OUTSIDE it.
  => VOTE SPLITTING: the 'Savory' bloc is an outright majority (57 vs
     Donut's 22) but split across 3 candidates, so Donut won Choose-One.
     STAR elected Arepa.

Bloc STAR has nothing to split. Support pools across a side's candidates because scoring one costs you nothing on the others, so running a third truck can't cost the savory side a seat. That is the same property single-winner STAR is sold on, and it survives intact into the multi-winner case. It is also why the sweep is the only structural complaint worth making about Bloc STAR — you have to actually be a majority to sweep, and no amount of candidate-rationing gets you one.

Ranked ballots don't buy you proportionality¶

The clearest lesson in that table is the pair of columns that agree. Bloc Ranked Robin sweeps just as hard as Bloc STAR (2:0), while STV and STAR-PR both split the seats (1:1) — one on a ranked ballot, one on a scored one.

So sweeps and shares are decided by the count — quotas, reweighting, transfers — not by the ballot's shape. "We'll switch to ranked ballots so minorities get represented" does not follow, and stating it that way in a public argument is a hostage to fortune. The ballot decides what voters can say; the count decides how seats are shared.

Choosing¶

Once you've decided you want a majoritarian body at all (the fork is the bigger decision), the choice within the family comes down to two questions:

Do you want expressiveness, or the simplest possible count? Bloc STAR and Bloc Approval both let voters support as many candidates as they like; only Bloc STAR lets them say how much, at the cost of a two-round count and a per-seat runoff to explain. Block Plurality's tally is a child's arithmetic — and it's the one that walks straight into vote splitting.
Do you want one ballot for every race? This is the underrated one. The 0–5 STAR ballot is the same physical ballot for single-winner, Bloc, and proportional races — so a jurisdiction can change what a body is for without retraining its voters. SNTV and Limited Voting change the instruction line with the seat count.

And if the sweep is what you're trying to avoid, don't shop within this family at all — every method on this page will sweep. Go to STAR-PR or STV.