Had a fun little exercise with our HOA recently. Seven member board, and each year half the seats are open for election. Over the years, two rules have come in

Had a fun little exercise with our HOA recently. Seven member board, and each year half the seats are open for election. Over the years, two rules have come into tension. First, in order for a new candidate to be elected, they have to get a majority (not just a plurality) of the votes - 50% + 1. I think the original thought was that if a large number of candidates ran and no one got over 30% of the votes or something, they shouldn't be eligible for the board. If not enough new candidates get 50% support, then the incumbent can keep their seat, in order of votes. The second rule is that you can only vote for a number of candidates matching the number of openings. So if there are only three openings, and seven people are running, you can only vote for three of them. If you vote for more, your ballot gets thrown out. The board has had problems lately so we had a lot of candidates in a recent election. I remember liking five of them, but I could only vote for three. There were roughly 1000 votes, and the most popular "reform" candidates got around 490, 460, 450, 420 votes, so none of them made it in (they clearly had split the vote). The incumbents that retained their seats got vote totals like 350, 275 - one incumbent got the second lowest of all running candidates, but got to keep his seat. Obviously anti-democratic - as interest increases in replacing board members, it becomes less possible to do so. There are remedies such as Instant Runoff voting, but the way we vote and count is that you get your ballot in the mail, put a checkmark next to the names you want, and then counting teams count up the checkmarks (discarding the ballots with "too many" checkmarks). Manually counting IRV was deemed too onerous for our process. Another, and my favored solution for this sort of scenario, is Approval Voting, where you simply put a checkmark next to all the candidates you approve of, and then all the checkmarks are counted by the same counting teams, without discarding the ballots with "too many" checkmarks, since it's no longer possible for there to be "too many" checkmarks on a ballot. We gave presentations to the board, explained it as thoroughly as possible, made the case that what the elections were doing (due to the 50% rule) was measuring the level of support for each candidate, and that only Approval Voting was capable of measuring that accurately, subject to our other restrictions. It failed on a 4-3 vote. Of the votes against, one was "it's been working fine the way it is", another was "It sounds funny", one gave no explanation, and one indicated the lawyers were of the opinion it wasn't allowable. In the next election, the three "yes" votes chose not to run for re-election and were replaced.