To whom did my vote go?

Abstract

Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences among candidates. The system is complex and it is not always obvious how an individual's vote contributes to candidates' tallies across rounds of tabulation. This short paper presents a demonstration system that allows voters to enter an example vote in a past Australian STV election, and see: (i)~how that vote would have been transferred between candidates; and (ii)~how much that vote would have contributed to the tallies of relevant candidates, across rounds of tabulation.