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Pets Governance — six positions, six methods (majoritarian vs proportional)

One electorate elects a whole pet government six different ways. The lesson is the sharpest divide in multi-winner voting: majoritarian methods hand every seat to the majority; proportional methods seat the minority. All six races are reproducible on BetterVoting (see "On BetterVoting" below), and all six are cross-checked against our LH engine.

▶ Live on BetterVoting: vote · results ↗ (election kcf8vf, Test ID BV2134). Frozen export: pets_gov_bv2134_kcf8vf_bv_export.json.

The electorate

22 voters in two parties:

  • Furries (majority, 13 voters): Dog, Cat, Fish — score their own high, the Others low; rank Dog > Cat > Fish > Bird > Rabbit > Hamster.
  • Others (minority, 9 voters): Bird, Rabbit, Hamster — the mirror image; rank Bird > Rabbit > Hamster > Fish > Cat > Dog.

The majority is 59%, the minority 41% — so a fair 3-seat body "should" be roughly 2–1.

Five positions, five methods

Position Method Seats Winners Character
Mayor page · Ranked Robin 1 Dog Condorcet — majority's consensus
Council page · Bloc STAR 3 Dog, Fish, Cat majoritarian — majority sweeps
Committee page · Approval 2 Dog, Cat majoritarian — majority again
Council (PR) page · STAR-PR 3 Bird, Dog, Fish proportional — minority seated
Delegates page · STV 3 Dog, Bird, Cat proportional — minority seated
Neighborhood Reps page · Bloc Plurality (SNTV) 2 Dog, Bird concentrated votes → minority seated

Every winner is tabulated by the LH engine (starvote_larry_hastings.py); mirrors are in pets_governance_tabulated/.

The one lesson

Give the same 59/41 electorate three seats:

  • Bloc STAR and STV read identical intent, but Bloc STAR gives the majority all three (Dog, Fish, Cat) while STV gives two to the majority and one to the minority (Dog, Cat + Bird). That's the whole majoritarian-vs-proportional distinction in one comparison.
  • STAR-PR agrees with STV that the minority earns a seat (Bird), differing only on the majority's third pick (Fish vs Cat) — two proportional methods, nearly the same body.
  • The single-winner offices (Mayor by Ranked Robin, and the 2-seat Committee by Approval) are inherently majoritarian here: with a cohesive 59% bloc, the majority's favorites win. Dog is the Condorcet winner, so every Condorcet method would also elect Dog mayor.

So a minority that is shut out of the Council-by-Bloc and the Committee is represented on the Council-by-PR and the Delegates — same voters, different rules.

On BetterVoting

All five races are reproducible on BetterVoting. BV's runBlocTabulator is a generic bloc/sequential multi-winner driver used by STAR, Approval, Plurality and Ranked Robin — so Bloc STAR is voting_method: STAR with num_winners: 3, and Bloc Approval is voting_method: Approval with num_winners: 2 (the bloc behavior comes from the winner count, not a separate method). STAR-PR, STV and Ranked Robin map directly. This set is created as a single multi-race BV election (BV2134); the winners above are the LH tabulation, cross-checked against BetterVoting's own tabulators.

The sixth position — Neighborhood Reps by Bloc Plurality / SNTV (2 seats) — elects Dog, Bird: with choose-one ballots each party's votes concentrate on its champion, so the minority's Bird takes the second seat (SNTV landing ~proportional, unlike Bloc Approval which gave the majority both seats). It's cross-checked like the rest: the LH engine now does multi-winner Plurality (SNTV) — Plurality + num_winners>1 elects the top-N by first-choice count — and Bloc Ranked Robin (RankedRobin + num_winners>1, top-N by record). So all six races are LH-tabulated and BV-confirmed.

Confirmed on BetterVoting (kcf8vf). All six races match: BV's runBlocTabulator (Bloc STAR, Bloc Approval, Bloc Plurality), Allocated-Score PR, and STV elect exactly the seats our engines do. The only cosmetic difference is seat order in STAR-PR — BV reports Dog, Bird, Fish; LH reports Bird, Dog, Fish — the same three winners, just a different order of election.

See also