In Reply to: Election of MED's to the board of the Trustee Company posted by David Griffiths on 17 October 2002 at 20:19:41:
David,
The authorities don't seem too keen on the electorate thinking about how the election works - the algorithm used in our election is not published anywhere. This is a contrast to the election currently being run under a similar but slightly different scheme for the British Computer Society.
In that BCS election the algorithm is published, there is a summary of it on the ballot paper, and the ballot paper says "under no circumstances can a later preference count against an earlier preference". That is the key feature of a transferable vote - you are not giving a fraction of your vote to various candidates, you are giving your vote to your number 1 with the proviso that if he/she can't make use of it (because they already have enough to be elected or because they are out of the running because of too few votes) then your vote transfers to the next on your list.
Your particular concerns are both valid - you may be giving support to somebody worse than the person you are trying to vote against because you don't know about everybody. But that is not much different from the risk that when you put somebody at number 1 you are denying support to somebody better that you happen not to know about.
Your second concern, about promoting an employee over a retiree for the dual-availability slot, can also happen. But I think it can only happen if the retirees that you put high on your list have been eliminated through lack of votes. So you can act against this happening by prefering retirees when filling in numbers against people you know little about.
The short answer to all this is that with an election system that doesn't allow you to say exactly what you want, and with imperfect knowledge of the candidates, there is no certain way of knowing you are doing the right thing. The most you can do is think carefully about it, and discuss it, as you obviously are doing.