The vote Package: Single Transferable Vote and Other Electoral Systems in R

TL;DR

The paper introduces the R 'vote' package, implementing various electoral systems including a novel STV variant, to facilitate election analysis for small electorates and multi-winner scenarios.

Contribution

It presents the first software implementation of STV with equal preferences and a new variant requiring minimum candidates from a group to be elected.

Findings

Effective for small electorates and multi-winner elections

Includes novel STV variants not previously available in software

Provides real-world examples demonstrating utility

Abstract

We describe the vote package in R, which implements the plurality (or first-past-the-post), two-round runoff, score, approval and single transferable vote (STV) electoral systems, as well as methods for selecting the Condorcet winner and loser. We emphasize the STV system, which we have found to work well in practice for multi-winner elections with small electorates, such as committee and council elections, and the selection of multiple job candidates. For single-winner elections, the STV is also called instant runoff voting (IRV), ranked choice voting (RCV), or the alternative vote (AV) system. The package also implements the STV system with equal preferences, for the first time in a software package, to our knowledge. It also implements a new variant of STV, in which a minimum number of candidates from a specified group are required to be elected. We illustrate the package with several real examples.