One very important part of getting STV to work well is the quota - if a candidate has enough votes to guarantee that they would be elected (so, for a 3-seat dis

One very important part of getting STV to work well is the quota - if a candidate has enough votes to guarantee that they would be elected (so, for a 3-seat district, 25%+1 of votes) then additional votes should be transferred BEFORE eliminating any candidates. Some systems do this randomly (randomly choose ballots and take the next preference), and some do this fractionally (e.g. transferred votes are worth whatever fraction wasn't needed to elect their previous choices). Overall, though, the point is that if your middle choice is eliminated, then either your vote wasn't enough, or a previous choice needed your support already. That said, most systems 'skip' over previously elected candidates as well. Strictly speaking, doing that can mean ballots with a losing first candidate are more powerful than ballots where the first candidate is elected by a narrow margin[1]. That said, as per the wiki link, there's a solution (recalculate all instead of skipping previously elected) and tactical voting around that issue isn't seen in practice anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_transferable_vote#Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_tr...