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Glossary — Bloc STAR

Method-specific terms for Bloc STAR. The STAR vocabulary it builds on (scoring round, automatic runoff, Equal Support, runoff reversal) is in the STAR glossary; shared cross-method vocabulary (vote splitting, monotonicity, summability, quota) is in the main glossary.

  • Bloc STAR — multi-winner STAR: fill N seats by running the whole single-winner count N times — elect a winner, remove them from the field, re-run on the same unchanged ballots. Majoritarian, not proportional. voting_method: Bloc STAR (aliases bloc, bloc star) plus num_winners: N. → Bloc STAR; demo 00_c3_b3_bloc-baseline-2-seats
  • Majoritarian (of a multi-winner method) — fills every seat by asking "who do the most voters want?", with no notion of a fair share. The opposite of proportional, which shares seats among coalitions in proportion to their support. Both are legitimate; they answer different questions. → Electing more than one, simply
  • At-large — elected by the whole electorate rather than by a district or ward. The usual real-world setting for a bloc count: an at-large city council, a board, a school committee. It is also the feature that carries the legal risk — not the ballot. → At-large elections and the Voting Rights Act
  • The majority sweep — the defining consequence: a cohesive majority can win every seat, leaving a large minority with none. Not a malfunction — it is what majoritarian means. → The majority sweep; worked at ex12_bloc_sweep
  • Vote dilution — the sweep seen from the law: an at-large system that, in a place where voting is racially polarized and the minority community is geographically clustered, reliably denies that community the representation a district would have given it. Actionable under §2 of the Voting Rights Act; the screen courts apply is the three Gingles preconditions (Thornburg v. Gingles, 1986) — a minority large and compact enough to be a district majority, politically cohesive, facing a majority that votes as a bloc to defeat its preferred candidate. At-large elections are not banned; they become indefensible where those conditions hold. → At-large elections and the Voting Rights Act
  • Cohesive (of a bloc) — agreed enough on a common slate to actually convert its size into seats. A 60% side that scatters its scores across five candidates can lose seats to a disciplined 40% side, so the sweep is a capability, not a guarantee.
  • Slate — the set of candidates a faction runs and asks its supporters to back together. Bloc STAR rewards slate discipline (score them uniformly) but, unlike SNTV, never punishes a slate for being too long — there is no vote to split. → Honest limits
  • The removal step — dropping a seated candidate from the field before the next seat is counted. It removes them from the running only: no ballot is altered, no score discounted, and every remaining candidate's total is unchanged. Contrast reweighting, STAR-PR's machinery, which deliberately does reduce the influence of ballots that already won a seat. → Bloc STAR
  • Sequential vs. top-N — Bloc STAR is sequential: it decides one seat at a time, because STAR's runoff compares exactly two finalists and can't be truncated at N. Bloc Approval, SNTV and Bloc Ranked Robin are top-N: they produce one ranking and cut it. The practical difference is that a tie in a sequential count can change who wins a later seat. → Bloc STAR among the at-large methods
  • Seat order — the order the winners were elected in, printed by the engine as the Round sequence. Real information: a rough strength ranking of the winners, and the record of which seat a tiebreak decided. It says nothing about the losers.
  • Path dependence (of a bloc count) — the property that how seat 1 was resolved changes the field seat 2 is decided in. Its sharp edge: a lot-decided seat 1 can produce a different set of winners, not merely a different order. → Ties in Bloc STAR; the engine-verified pair lot A / lot B
  • Bloc Ranked Robin / SNTV / Block Plurality / Bloc Approval — the other majoritarian multi-winner methods, all top-N. In LH: RankedRobin, Plurality, and Approval respectively, each with num_winners > 1. → the family table; worked side by side at Food-Truck Row

Bloc STAR is the majoritarian half of multi-winner STAR; the proportional half is STAR-PR (Allocated Score, SSS, RRV). Shared criteria are in the main glossary.