elections - both single-member and multimember - is straight voting.
Consider a double-member district election under straight voting.
All voters have the same number of votes as in the straight voting case (two in this example), but they have more options as to how they can distribute their votes among the candidates.
In this article we examine theoretically and empirically both cumulative voting and straight voting in multimember district elections.
We show that the tendencies to plump votes in straight voting and to cumulate votes in cumulative voting are related directly to the conditional probabilities of which candidates, in the event of a tie, are likely to tie for the last seat rather than first place.
We consider the voting equilibria in multimember districts under straight voting and then under cumulative voting.
Our configuration also allows us to test the argument, presented earlier, that multimember districts with straight voting are biased against the election of minority candidates.
In each election under straight voting, a voter can either abstain or cast one vote each for up to two candidates.
In straight voting elections, voters have two undominated vote vectors: vote only for their most preferred candidate or vote for both their first and second preferences.
Figure 1 illustrates the possible voting equilibria under straight voting.
We can identify five possible equilibria in straight voting, labeled points 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in Figure 1 and summarized in Table 2.
