Interesting anecdote: When I lived in Cambridge, MA in 2015, we had an election for 9 city council seats with 23 candidates. Here's a specimen ballot from that

Interesting anecdote: When I lived in Cambridge, MA in 2015, we had an election for 9 city council seats with 23 candidates. Here's a specimen ballot from that election (PDF): https://www.cambridgema.gov/election/~/media/483A54C6BC8546F8AD407D87FACFFC5E.ashx https://www.cambridgema.gov/election/~/media/483A54C6BC8546F... The "slate" strategy (called "horse-trading" in this article) was strongly entrenched for that election. The idea is that if you and other people all support some "slate" that is a subset of the running candidates, then if you all rank those candidates in the same order on your ballot, it can boost every one of those candidates chances of being elected (this strategy is most effective in multi-seat races, such as this 9-seat city council race). The reason this works is that if a candidate meets the quota of first-choice votes needed to earn a seat, they are elected. If more people chose them as first choice than the quota, some of the ballots will instead roll over and count for their second choice (etc etc). Which ballots move on? This is largely influenced by the overall proportion of second-choice votes. So if everybody packed the two candidates in the same order, it maximizes the number of ballots for that candidate that will be used in the second-choice tally. All voting systems have tradeoffs. The nice property of this one is that I was able to elect multiple city councilors who supported policies that mattered to me. Likewise, as long as 1/9th (plus one) of the city's population put a candidate as their #1 choice in that election, that candidate was guaranteed a seat. That sounds pretty fair to me!