We love being able to show our preferences. We want to vote our conscience. But is RCV really the best option?
Opinion | Give ranked voting a shot. Our democracy would benefit.
Ranked-choice voting empowers the majority by allowing voters to order their choices.
An Examination of Ranked Choice Voting in the United States, 2004-2022
From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a database of 182 American ranked-choice elections for political office from the years 2004-2022 to investigate empirically how frequently RCV's deficiencies manifest in practice. Our general finding is that RCV's weaknesses are rarely observed in real-world elections, with the exception that ballot exhaustion frequently causes majoritarian failures.
How Approval Voting and Ranked Choice Voting Are Different | Center for Election Science
How Approval Voting and Ranked Choice Voting Are Different
Preliminary ranked choice voting results in Alaska’s 2026 elections - FairVote
On November 3, Alaskans went to the polls in critical ranked choice voting elections for Congress, governor, and state legislature.
Bridging Voting and Deliberation with Algorithms: Field Insights from vTaiwan and Kultur Komitee
Democratic processes increasingly aim to integrate large-scale voting with face-to-face deliberation, addressing the challenge of reconciling individual preferences with collective decision-making. This work introduces new methods that use algorithms and computational tools to bridge online voting with face-to-face deliberation, tested in two real-world scenarios: Kultur Komitee 2024 (KK24) and vTaiwan. These case studies highlight the practical applications and impacts of the proposed methods. We present three key contributions: (1) Preference-based Clustering for Deliberation (PCD), which enables both in-depth and broad discussions in deliberative settings by computing homogeneous and heterogeneous group compositions with balanced and adjustable group sizes; (2) Human-in-the-loop MES, a practical method that enhances the Method of Equal Shares (MES) algorithm with real-time digital feedback. This builds algorithmic trust by giving participants full control over how much decision-making is delegated to the voting aggregation algorithm as compared to deliberation; and (3) the ReadTheRoom deliberation method, which uses opinion space mapping to identify agreement and divergence, along with spectrum-based preference visualisation to track opinion shifts during deliberation. This approach enhances transparency by clarifying collective sentiment and fosters collaboration by encouraging participants to engage constructively with differing perspectives. By introducing these actionable frameworks, this research extends in-person deliberation with scalable digital methods that address the complexities of modern decision-making in participatory processes.
STAR Voting
We should be able to vote our conscience, our votes should never be wasted, and our elections should accurately reflect the will of the people. It's not rocket science. It's Star Voting.
Decision Index 0.3
Open reproductions of Jev ranked by the Full score: public benchmarks plus private tests and private tasks from new domains. Switch to the public board alone or to the vision board.
Ranking is already an action - Sensemaker
Before an AI clicks, buys or writes, another system may already have decided what it sees first. That choice needs controls and evidence too.
Priorities | celeste4sos.com
The right to vote, better representation and election integrity.
It's Possible to Reduce Polarization without Reducing Engagement
The results of the Prosocial Ranking Challenge
Victorian State Voting Intention: L-NP (26%) and ALP (26%) level on primary and ahead of One Nation (23.5%); however, L-NP narrowly leads ALP on two-party preferred basis (51% cf. 49%) - Roy Morgan Research
In early August the L-NP Coalition 26% (up 2% since April) and ALP 26% (up 0.5%) are level on primary vote ahead of One Nation 23.5% (down 1%) and 24.5% (down 1.5%) support Other Parties and Independents including the Greens 12.5% (down 1%), Other Parties 4% (unchanged) and Independents 8% (down 0.5%) according to a special SMS Roy Morgan Poll conducted from August 5-7, 2026, with a representative Victoria-wide cross-section of 2,084 electors.
Victorian Liberals to preference One Nation at state election
The preference strategy, while designed to galvanise the anti-Labor vote across the state, risks a backlash in the party’s urban and middle-suburb heartland.
Characterizing the causes, dynamics, and consequences of choice deferral
The fact that people often avoid making decisions is well known, and past research has helped to identify some of the conditions and reasons for doing so. For instance, people may forgo choices between bad options because they prefer not to end up with one of those options. It is much less clear when and why people avoid choosing in cases where they eventually will have to make a given decision. To study such instances of choice deferral, we presented participants with a series of choices, and for each choice they were allowed to either choose immediately or defer the decision until later in the experiment. Across six experiments and three choice domains (choices among consumer goods, artwork, and political candidates), we find that the strongest predictor of choice deferral is the overall value of a given set of options, with relative value (i.e., how hard it is to identify the best option) counterintuitively playing a smaller role. We show that the influence of overall value on choice deferral can be accounted for by a dynamic decision model according to which participants appraise the option set relative to a criterion before deciding whether to choose or defer, comparing this to a previous model whereby participants make such a decision based on a predetermined decision time limit. We further reveal that the influence of overall value on choice deferral is determined by how congruent options are with a given choice goal (choose-best or choose-worst) rather than simply how bad those options are. Collectively, our findings shed new light on how people decide to put off the inevitable.
The Preference Cascade Is Only Getting Started
We are in the midst of a preference cascade about existential risk from AI.
