Same votes, different winners
Nine friends are choosing dinner: 🍕 pizza, 🍜 Thai or 🍣 sushi. Change how each one feels, and see who wins under each way of voting. The counting is the same code that counts every TallyLab poll.
Try an example:
Pizza beats Thai, Thai beats sushi, and sushi beats pizza, each 6 to 3. No option is the group's favorite, so every method has to break a tie: ranked choice for last place, the others for first. The Marquis de Condorcet noticed this in 1785; it's the puzzle behind Arrow's theorem, which shows that no ranked voting method can be fair in every way at once.
Who wins
The same votes give two different winners. Pick a method to see how it counts.
How quadratic counts
More →Each friend has 100 credits. One vote costs 1 credit, two cost 4, three cost 9: the square of the votes. That makes it costly to pile everything on one option, so how much someone cares shows.
Here, each friend puts +6 on their favorite, +4 on others they're happy with and -4 against the rest. Friends who feel strongly put +9 on their favorite (81 credits), leaving ±3 for the others.
Pizza, Thai and Sushi tied. TallyLab breaks ties with a random draw that stays the same for each poll; here it picked Pizza.
Head to head
For each pair, how many friends rank one above the other.
- Pizza beats Thai, 6 to 3
- Sushi beats Pizza, 6 to 3
- Thai beats Sushi, 6 to 3
No option beats both others one on one: they go round in a loop.
Try it with your own group
Make an approval or ranked choice poll in a minute and share the link. Free, no sign-up.