As we approach the voting period — polls open noon UTC 16 November (check the time in your area) and close 48 hours later, at noon UTC 18 November (check the time in your area) — we bring you one more resource: everything you ever wanted to know about the voting process!
We're providing both textual and graphic explanations of the process, and cover how to cast your vote, how we tally the results, and plenty of examples. There's a short version for those who just want the basics, and, below the cut, a long version for those interested in the details. Let's go!
The Short Version
How to Cast Your Vote
- You will be asked to log in with the password you chose for your voting account.
- The ballot contains five candidates and a placeholder slot. Please leave the placeholder unranked! It is required by the voting software, but is not an actual candidate. For a more detailed explanation, check out the long version below.
- Since there are only four available seats and five candidates, you will be asked to rank candidates in order of your first preference, followed by second preference, and so on.
- You are not required to rank all the candidates — voters must rank at least one candidate, but otherwise can rank as many or as few as they wish.
- Once you are satisfied with your rankings, click on the "Vote" button to cast your vote.
- Warning: There’s no going back after you cast your vote, so please consider your choices carefully! :)
How We Tally Results
- Vote tallies will be done by modified IRV (instant-runoff voting), also known as preferential voting process. (You can read more about IRV here at our elections website, or in the second half of this post.)
- If there is a simple majority of first preferences for a candidate (i.e., the candidate is the top choice on more than 50% of the ballots), then that candidate takes one of the seats and is removed from consideration for all the other seats.
- After a candidate is seated, the initial ballots will be recounted to fill the next seat, and the next, until all seats are filled, removing from consideration the candidates selected for the previous seats. Since each vote starts over from the original pool, based on voter preferences, each round is its own separate selection process.
- In any instance where there is no simple majority, the following steps will be taken to determine the winner of the given seat:
- The candidate with the fewest first preference votes is eliminated from this cycle.
- The votes that would have gone to the eliminated candidate are replaced by each affected voter's next preference, and the votes are re-tallied for the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until a 50% majority is reached and the seat is filled.
- Once that seat is filled, a new cycle of voting begins for the next seat, returning to the initial ballot. Any candidate already elected to a seat is removed from consideration, and all votes for those candidates are replaced by respective voters' next preferences. After this cascade, first preference votes are re-tallied.
- Steps 1 and 2 are repeated until a simple majority is reached for each seat.
A Few Takeaways
- This process lets us fill multiple seats with a single ballot and without any hierarchy among the elected candidates.
- A candidate with the most votes overall may not necessarily get a seat if those votes aren't as high-preference. Similarly, a candidate with few first-preference votes early on in the process may win a seat as candidates are eliminated and preferences cascade. See the graphics for examples!
- A lowest-preference vote is different from leaving a candidate off your ballot entirely. A low-preference vote can still eventually cascade into a high-preference vote through elimination of other candidates in that cycle. Leaving a candidate unranked means they don't get your vote at all.
- Since, after the one required ranking, voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, voters have many options for how to distribute their votes. But be careful — ranking only one candidate, for example, does not give that single vote any more "weight" and means you have no voice in ranking the remaining candidates — but it does mean none of the other candidates get any vote from you. Distribute your votes with care!
Pictures!
We've had several awesome contributors put together graphical representations of the process, as well as a text-based walkthrough and a step-by-step look at some sample voting data in raw tabular form. Take a look!
Below is a macro view of the process, representing votes by aggregate as slices in a pie chart.
( images behind the cut! )
Please note that Purple, who was last to be eliminated from the first cycle and had many first preference votes in the first round of that cycle, did not get a seat in this example. Meanwhile, Red, who had relatively few first preference votes in the first cycle, won a seat in the second cycle. Wondering how this can work? Check out the next set of images, which shows how the votes move around!
This next set of images provides a closer look, taking a very small data sample and showing the individual votes and how preferences cascade as candidates are eliminated. (Click on the images for full-sized versions.)
The rest of this set of images, as well as the long version of the IRV explanation, the text-based example, and the tabular example are all over at the full version of this post, on the OTW site!
Check out the rest of the post!
Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog.
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