STV Elections by Feedback Counting: An Approach from Cooperative Game Theory

We describe the mechanism of feedback methods of counting single transferable votes, such as Meek's method, in the framework of n-person strategic games. We show that the games are in the class introduced by Masuzawa (International Journal of Game Theory 32:2003 and 37:2008), and that for any given finite domain of keep value, the algorithm by Masuzawa (2008) correctly maximizes the set of winners and minimizes the corresponding keep values. Starting at zero, our algorithm increases the keep value of any candidate until the surplus becomes positive, while the prevailing method decreases it and does not necessarily attain the maximum set of winners.