trustthevote
commented
2 years ago Both are meaningful but not identical. "multiple selections for an office" is the way to encode an N-of-M contest, for sure. 7 candidate selections for a town council that has 4 seats open, but 4 more write-in slots. Sometimes that is called an "at large" model, where everybody in the district selects all the council members.
However, there is also case where there are X seats on the council that are being filled in this election, with a separate contest. In that case, they really are separate contents: one contest for the council seat #2 and another for the council seat #5. Each "seat" is like a mini-district. Since they are truly separate contests, they could have entirely different candidate lists or overlapping or identical -- that's an issue for for the EMS and its operator. Typically in these cases each would be a 1-of-x contest, but not always, again that's an issue for the EMS.
But for true N of M contests, the "multiple selections for an office" encoding is the right one.
There are several ways to encode an n-of-m contest: one is multiple selections for an office (e.g., 7 selections for a town council that has 4 members, two of whom are open for election); another is multiple selections for multiple seats (e.g., council seats 1 and 2 are up for election this year.)
John Sebes, which model do you prefer?