A voting system called the “Single Transferable Vote” (STV) will be used at the Highland Council Elections on 3 May 2012. Voters will indicate their preference of first, second, etc for candidates. A quota and formulae system will then decide which candidate is elected based on the preferences as indicated by the voters.
In an STV election, the quota is the number of votes a candidate needs to get elected.
The counting concept for STV has been diagrammatically illustrated by the New Zealand Government - the basic idea of how the system works can be found by clicking here.