tadmilbourn
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
695
Submissions
96
Member since
Mar 20
Founder RankedVote (https://www.rankedvote.co)
Formerly CEO & Co-founder Payable (YC S14) acquired by Stripe.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
What device/browser are you on where it's hopping around? I've been manually testing across devices so that the "typing text animation" stays stable. 174px actually creates a bit more height than I desire on mobile safari/iphone. But knowing what you browser you were on will help me troubleshoot.
Comment · 4 years ago
That is an option! You can choose between the "Grid" ballot type which simulates what's used on real-world paper ballots. There's also "Drag and Drop" which works particularly well on mobile touch devices. People just drag their most preferred to the top! Try it on this demo: https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/...
Comment · 4 years ago
I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super enlightening and well-researched on this very idea (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry) actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make progress on immigration reform because that lessens its saliency for raising money and turning out the base.
The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November.
Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks for the nudge! Great to have fresh eyes on these things and love your thinking. I added an "automatically" to step 3. More importantly, I changed "Voters rank." to "Voters rank once" in the headline of that section.
P.S. Gotta love Webflow for making changes like this super quick.
Comment · 4 years ago
It allows you to ask the "ranking question" BUT it doesn't do the ranked-choice calculation with the results. So, in theory, you can use it to collect the votes, but you'll need to do the calculations by hand. I actually wrote an article on this exact thing as a bit of an SEO play: https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voti...
Comment · 4 years ago
Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.
Comment · 4 years ago
Hehe...a bunch of Nate Cohn's in your friend group? :-)
In the event multiple choices have the same number of votes and those choices are the lowest vote getters in the round, RankedVote calculates a Borda Score for each of those candidates across all ballots that were cast. Basically just saying "Ok, these three candidates were tied, which one was ranked lowest on average across the entire group of voters?" And then eliminate that one.
Comment · 4 years ago
On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused. There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a wide array of voting options and calculation methods.
On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks for the kind words!
And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool. FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is better than picking a name out of a hat!
You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in terms of "does this move things forward from the status quo?"
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks! And both approval and RCV are steps in the right direction. For whatever reason, RCV has been implemented more broadly (but still just a tiny fraction of the US).
I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the special election that just happened there in August. 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election workers implementing it had a flawless go of it.
Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters: https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
Comment · 4 years ago
Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote.
BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.
Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game.
Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
Comment · 5 years ago
Simple...because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places. Approval and STAR are great methods as well. But they're not what's in use in Maine. Or NYC. Or will be in use in Alaska.
So, in the spirit of focusing where I can have the most impact, I've chosen to most directly support RCV.
First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.
Comment · 5 years ago
New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal.
But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and nearly two dozen cities in Utah. That's a pretty diverse set of locales across the U.S.
Article on Alaska: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ran...
Article on Utah: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-...