Burlington Vermont’s 2009 Mayoral race provides a great example for visualizing the results of ranked choice elections. It’s the most consequential real-world case where a Condorcet winner beat a runoff winner (the legally elected winner), but where both beat the plurality winner. If you like controversy, you’ve come to the right dataset. There’s more about…
The music in this video is from Rain Dance, the opening track of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, released by Columbia in 1973. I’m hoping to brand Sygnol (AimsPoll’s API provider) with music from the whole album, using snips for lead ins, interludes, promos, and tone. YouTube already permits me to mix and replay this music. But…
Fairvote, a leading proponent of ranked choice voting, has been running a series of events to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It all culminates in the Champions of Democracy Awards Reception, in New York on Monday night. I think it’s appropriate to send congratulations to Krist Novoselic, who’s been serving as Fairvote’s Chair for nearly a…
Here’s another illustration of the listicle sorting app I’m putting together. For now, I’m still making images by hand. But I’m also moving ahead on building tools for automated assembly. This 4×4 grid is a draft for the top level of the Sygnol namespace, presented in alphabetical order. When the system goes live, you’d be…
I’m setting up an experiment on ranked choice polling via Twitter. It lets you rank your preferences for the upcoming Oscars. To use it, you would tweet your ranks using the list below. You can use the link to see a trailer for the film. The tweet would start with #syg to announce you’re intending…
Users of previous ranked choice straw poll sites I created are being invited by email to try AimsPoll. The message I’m sending out has a short description of what’s going on. I wanted to say more, but the initial draft got way too long. So, anyone interested in the full thought process can read it here.…
Here’s a handy formula that expresses a key virtue of ranked-choice interfaces over head-to-head pairwise evaluations… N(N-1)/2. Head-to-head interfaces are typical of “Whose hotter?” sites such as candobetter.com. The point is to simplify the task of evaluating a long list of options. Users view a randomly selected pair of images from a large set, and…
Note from April 8, 2015. I spent several days with SurveyMonkey before discovering and falling in awe wwih SurveyGizmo. Unfortunately, Gizmo doesn’t have Monekey’s very nice question element styling feature, which I was using to put candidate pictures in the sortable list object. But so many other features are so good, the scales tip heavily.…
During the process of collecting Twitter metrics on the candidates, I started adding in comparisons of several voter-oriented online groups. It’s intriguing to see which folks put a lot of effort into tweeting, despite having relatively small numbers of followers. That’s why the traction metric is useful. Going for volume without enough traction risks wheel spinning.
With luck, AimsPoll will be evolving into something much more than just a Twitter feed. This video provides a look at the kinds of technology being put together.