Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

RankedVote’s goal is to build support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and make decisions online.

Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting
rankedvote.co

One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that.

I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack.

Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!

I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of "My party will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in".

Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers from the same issues as ranked choice or not.

I'm tired of it all being game.

1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations.

2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.