You don’t have to be a psephologist to share Matt Yglesias’s dislike of first past the post voting systems. The sole virtue of such systems is that they are easy to understand: the person who gets the most votes in a straight count wins the election. Most everything else about them is problematic. In particular, a small edge in the percentage of votes cast usually translates into a huge advantage in terms of seats in parliament or congress. Thus, despite representing nearly a fifth of the electorate in Britain, the Liberal Democrats can expect to win less than 8 percent of seats in a general election.

Ireland, the ole green ’n’ lovely, has a multi-seat constituency, single transferable vote system. Here’s an explanation of how it works for the simplest case, the Presidential election, where there is only one seat to be won.

From the voters’ perspective, it’s almost as straightforward as First Past The Post. Multiple candidates run for a seat and you numerically rank them, with 1 being your first preference and so on down the list. (You don’t have to express a ranked preference: if you like, you can treat it exactly like FPTP; just check a box for one of them and leave it at that.) In the simplest case, a candidate is elected when they exceed the quota, which is defined as

No. of votes / (No. of seats + 1) + 1.

In the simplest case, a candidate receives more than the quota on the first count and is then elected. But in regular elections, there are multiple candidates and multiple seats (up to 5 per constituency in the Irish case). Once the first candidate is elected, his or her “surplus” of votes (over and above the quota) is taken and distributed to the other candidates on the basis of the next preference on the surplus ballots. If there are no surpluses to be distributed at the end of a count, the lowest-placed candidate is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the next preference candidate. Here’s an example of that process at work for an imaginary 2-seat constituency.

You can argue the merits of competing systems. (For instance, you can wonder whether very large countries could feasibly be administered by STV systems—Germany has a mixed system that addresses some potential problems.) But one thing that’s unarguably true is that systems like the Irish one make election nights vastly more interesting for political junkies. No question of it all being over before the polls close in California. Though simple from the voters’ point of view, STV systems offer endless possibilities for vote management by savvy political machines. You’ll usually have several candidates from the same party running in the same constituency, with the possibility that all of them (more likely at least two) could be elected. They also provide much more entertainment as the election night drags into the election weekend, with tightly-fought battles for the fifth seat in some constituencies coming down to the last view votes. If you go to the count center, you can (in a sense) watch your vote move through the counts as candidates are eliminated and surpluses transferred. Altogether much more enjoyable. If you like that sort of thing.