Preferential balloting (e.g., Single Transferable Voting) is used in some democracies to choose representatives to a legislature.
But what about once they are there: are there any examples of legislatures themselves (or any deliberative assembly, really) using preferential balloting to rank-order alternative proposals as opposed to traditional majority rule on a binary accept / reject decision.
In legislative decision-making contexts in which more than one option out of several can be pursued (e.g., out of these 20 infrastructure projects, which ten do we prefer and in what order?), it seems that the use of preferential ballots by legislators themselves could be in order.
My question is: are there any examples of this?
While not a formal legislative body, the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences uses a very close version of STV to pick winners for Academy Awards for their significant major awards: Decision Rules for the Academy Awards Versus Those for Elections.
William V. Gehrlein, Hemant V. Kher
Journal: Interfaces , vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 226-234, 2004
DOI: 10.1287/inte.1040.0072
Your question is related to the idea of electing a 'committee' as opposed to a single winner. STV is generally not considered a good option for that. In the context of your example, we might be considering possible infrastructure projects. One aspect of the overall program might be a serious need to develop a direct route of vehicular transportation between cities A and B that are separated by a river. So, one very appealing project would be to build a bridge between A and B. Another very appealing project would be to build a tunnel under the river between A and B. While both are very appealing and rated high in rankings of potential projects, it would not make any sense to do both even though STV would rate both of them as highly preferred. There are many other variations on this theme, such that it only makes sense to rank combinations of projects, rather than ranking individual projects.
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