search

BrightSpots / rcv

Ranked Choice Voting Universal Tabulator
Mozilla Public License 2.0
73 stars 19 forks source link

new overvote option: split vote #422

Open tarheel opened 4 years ago

tarheel commented 4 years ago

Some people might want to run contests in which voters are allowed to give the same rank to multiple candidates, and when the tabulator encounters this situation, it splits the ballot's vote (or whatever fraction of it remains) equally among those candidates.

chughes297 commented 4 years ago

Am wandering through issues this morning, this one stood out to me. It's an interesting idea but I'm hesitant about incorporating this because it's not used anywhere and introduces some additional complexity to the RCV counting process that should probably be hammered out in policy before we add it to the tabulator. Questions that come to mind are - if you rank two people first and then one of them is eliminated, does half your vote transfer to your second choice? Or should your full vote go to your remaining first choice? Can you subdivide an already divided vote?

Right now I think we leave this be, but can pick it up if anyone starts discussing using this sort of overvote method?

tarheel commented 4 years ago

I added this because it came up as a suggestion from Shel Kaphan on the RCV-systems mailing list. It could be useful for non-official uses of the tabulator (see the thread with subject "non-political example" from March).

if you rank two people first and then one of them is eliminated, does half your vote transfer to your second choice?

I definitely think your full vote should go to the remaining candidate who's ranked first in this case.