Thursday, August 27, 2015

Welcome to the OpaVote Blog!

We have just set up a blog to make it easier for us to share information with you to help you run your elections with OpaVote.  Here, we will have longer posts than what you will find on other social media sites, such as our Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages.

A huge motivation in creating OpaVote was to provide tools to make it easier for organizations around the world to use better voting methods.  Traditional check-the-box voting (a.k.a. first past the post or plurality) does not provide good outcomes in many situations, and organizations can have better outcomes by using better voting methods.  Accordingly, many of our posts will be focusing on the benefits of ranked-choice voting and other non-traditional voting methods, such as instant runoff voting, the single transferable vote, Condorcet voting, and approval voting.

To whet your appetite, here is a summary of blog posts that we will be working on:

  • Recommended voting methods for different types of elections (single winner, multi-winner, agenda setting)
  • Why instant runoff voting, Condorcet, and approval voting are all much better than traditional techniques
  • Why proportional representation (e.g., STV) is great for electing committees, councils, and other groups
  • Just say no to a None of the Above candidate
  • How to use OpaVote for onsite voting
Please let me know if you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see covered in a blog post.