Ranked Choice Voting – I am about to give up

Written by: Alex Patton
Political Research

I am frustrated.  What should have been an easy 1-2-3 project has turned into a mess.

It seems by offering people ranking, people are getting to the point of “throwing” away their votes – even may be enjoying it.

Just when I think we are making progress towards declaring a winner, the dreaded write-ins come into play AND we are losing people along the way with their votes becoming spoiled or exhausted.   We are at the point were we are exhausting ballots of those who picked 5 – and none of them are cracking the top 10.

Take for example this round, we eliminated “Pitstachio” (which is a damn fine flavor, sorry to see it go….) however, Pitaschio voters are a non-compromising bunch – writing in “Green Tea” and “Birthday Cake” (which had already been eliminated).

In attempting to code this, I seem to be spending an incredibly inordinate amount of time dealing with write ins and “exceptions”.  While this is not abnormal for coding, it is reducing my enthusiam…and we persist.

But really – damn it, I want to know the “answer” not continue to deal with Pistachio’s garbage.

I am at the point, were I am going to run the code and not paste each round.  Next post will declare the winner….

Stay tuned….

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