By campaigning for other people on the same slate, candidates are able to direct the transfer of their surplus votes to similarly minded candidates who will support them on the council.

[The candidates are all interested] in getting out progressive votes, "says Zeidenberg.

Many voters try to outthink the system by marking ballots to boost weaker candidates by not voting for their original first-choice candidate in the belief that that candidate will win without their support.

Zeidenberg says that many enthusiastic slate supporters have called CCA offices to ask for the name of the weakest candidate so that they can give them their #1 vote.

But slate organizers discourage voters from trying to out-think the system. "We say put down as #1 who you say your #1 choice is," says Zeidenberg.

"We try to encourage voters in the city to vote for the slate in whatever order they choose," says Turk.

That way, he says, voters can avoid "an unusual horse race in which you make the cleverest bet only to find yourself outsmarted in the end."

In Cambridge, voters who tried to beat the system cost former mayor Barbara Ackermann her seat on the council in 1977, many say.

"Voters assumed she didn't need their help," says Koocher.

Ackermann says she just hadn't concentrated enough on getting #1 votes. She says she doubts that will happen to the current mayor and frontrunner, Alice Wolf, because "Alice is campaigning like a whirlwind."

"My feeling is that they didn't get robbed, they got their first choice," says Ackermann.

But some candidates say that the best way of working PR is to pull in your hidden supporters by running as a one-issue candidate.

"I think I did well because I was committed to a strong rent control position," says former city councillor David E. Sullivan, the top vote-getter in the 1987 election.

Suzanne L. King, candidate R. Elaine Noble's campaign manager, agrees, saying the Noble campaign is trying to sell the idea of charter reform to the city.

"You're not concentrating on one specific area of the city but rather to an idea, a philosophy," she says. "We're doing all the outreach that we can."