Next IOW will be a Poll Vote

[Deleted]

It is time for another poll vote for the IOW.

The vote will open Sunday evening (Mountain Standard Time) and will close on Tuesday evening.

All members are encouraged to upload one or two photos to their galleries. If you upload more than two, please send me a message before 11am MST on Sunday to let me know which two you would like me to include in the poll, otherwise the decision will be mine.

I hope you will all participate with your images and in the subsequent voting!

[Bailey]

Just some food for thought as simple poll votes are a bug bear for me because unless one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the vote, then more than 50% of the votes will have been for the other candidates, so you don't have a clear winner.

Is it possible for the poll vote system to somehow allow preference votes?

For example, instead of just voting for the best item the voter would need to vote for all the items in order of their preference.

Consider this scenario: There are 5 widget candidates A,B,C,D,E and 20 voters selecting just their most preferred best widget.  Assuming the quality of the 5 widgets is very similar then you could end up with a scenario -

A - 3 votes
B - 4 votes
C - 2 votes
D - 6 votes
E - 5 votes

If widget D was declared the winner with only 6 out of 20 votes, I would have an issue with that decision because 14 out of 20 votes did not think D was the best widget.

But if voters had to vote for the 5 widgets in order of their preference then after the first round of counting, widget C would drop out and those 2 votes would be added to widget of the 2nd preference of each of those 2 votes.  Then the widget with the lowest total votes (including any preferences votes that came from the 2 votes from C) would drop out and then that widget's votes would be redistributed to the 3rd preference of each of the votes.  You continue this until 1 widget has more than 50% of the votes (11 in this case).  At the very least you could have a tie between 2 widgets with 10 total votes each.

IMHO, this preferential voting system is a much truer indication of the best widget than a straight out simple poll.

As I said at the start, just some food for thought


 

[Deleted]

Hi bailey,

thank you for your thoughts, but I think you are overthinking this a little for what is really just a bit of fun. We don't want to make this more complicated than it has to be, and while I understand what you are saying, it would take far to long to follow the process you propose and is also a lot more administration for the person who has volunteered to run a poll vote. Additionally, I am not actually sure if the poll vote feature on the forum would be able to handle the voting system in the way you propose.

I think for the time being we will remain with the voting system as it is, as it is very straight forward, easy to put together and does not take a lot of time to administer during and after the voting process.

[Bailey]

No problem Simone

I assumed it was meant to be just for fun, but reading some of the comments in previous IOW threads I sensed some take it more seriously than intended, hence my "food for thought" post. 

I was hoping preferential voting might be a simple option to select when creating a poll to enable voters to vote for each candidate according to their preference and the "system" would then count and redistribute the votes according to the preferences when voting closed to come up with a "winner".  I certainly would not expect the vote counting to be done manually by anyone.