Some OpaVote customers want to implement waterfall elections, and in this post, I explain how you can do this with OpaVote. Full disclosure, I just made up the name "waterfall election," but it needed a name and I kinda like it.

In a waterfall election, you are electing multiple positions, say president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. The key difference from regular elections is that people can run for more than one position. A person may want to be president, but if he doesn't win that election, then he might want to be vice president.

There are two main types of water fall elections, and I'll explain each below. You can use any of OpaVote's counting methods to do a waterfall election, but it works best when voters can rank all of the candidates, such as ranked-choice voting.

Cascade Waterfall Election

With a cascade waterfall election, there is a single ballot, each voter casts a single vote. The votes are counted to determine a first winner, and that person is elected president. The president is then removed from the ballots, the ballots are recounted, and the next winner is elected vice president, and so forth.

This is straightforward to implement in OpaVote. Here are the steps:

1. Run a regular OpaVote Election with a single winner. The winner of the election is president.
2. Download the ballots from the Election and create a Count. In the Count, you withdraw the president, and then count the ballots to determine the vice president.
3. Rinse and repeat with additional Counts as needed.

Segmented Waterfall Election

The U.S. political system is broken. Voters all over the spectrum agree. The brands of both major parties are in the toilet. Trump speaks for himself. Hillary is widely disliked even by members of her own party and lost to the most incompetent and embarrassing candidate for President in history (oops, I guess I just spoke for Trump).

Why is the brand of our only two viable parties in the toilet? Because they don't represent most of us.

The 2016 Presidential election clearly showed that the two parties do not truly represent us. Democratic voters were divisively split between the Bernie camp and the Hillary camp. Republican voters were so fractured that it is hard to identify all the factions, but we have establishment Republicans, Trump supporters, libertarians, evangelicals, and whatever it is that Ted Cruz represents (people that no one likes?).

Given that we can easily identify 7 or so groups of American voters, why is that the 435 voting members of Congress come from only two parties? Sure, the people elected to Congress do vary along the conservative to liberal scale, but first and foremost, the party controls. So many votes are party line. Almost every issue is Democrat vs. Republican with very little independent thought.

As an example of unrepresented people, let's take Trump supporters. For simplicity, I'll describe them as rural, white, working class people from communities where jobs are disappearing. In my view, both parties have paid scant attention to this group despite the fact that this group needs help -- their jobs are disappearing. I'll greatly oversimplify, but Republicans focus on lowering taxes and deregulation while Democrats focus on the middle class and gay and civil rights. None of these things help Trump supporters. Although Trump doesn't appear to be doing anything for his supporters, he directly and clearly spoke to them during the campaign and said he would help them.

With that long-winded intro, I'll now explain how we break free from the two-party system.

Kick the Parties out of the Primary

In most states, we have a Democratic primary election to choose a Democratic candidate, a Republican primary election to choose a Republican candidate, and a general election to choose between the Democrat and the Republican.

Although third-party candidates will often enter the fray, they only do so in the general election. At this stage, voters don't vote for a third-party candidate because they are afraid to elect their least-favorite candidate. For example, a Libertarian will vote for a Republican to make sure the Democrat can't win.

Instead, we could have what is called a top-two primary where all candidates compete together in a first round, and the top-two candidates then compete in a second round to determine the winner. It is possible that the second round has two candidates from the same party!

Why is this better? Consider what happened in France this year where they use a top-two primary.

Emmanuel Macron won the Presidency of France for the centrist En Marche party. What is amazing is that this party did not exist a year before. He created a party, and a year later he won the Presidency under that party. This is what happens when parties don't control primary elections. A brand new party has a chance to compete and win the Presidency.

Let's also look at the 2017 French Parliament elections, which also use a top-two primary. The En March party, which did not exist a year before, won 53% of the seats of the national parliament.

Americans would be well served by a centrist party, but we can't do that because the two parties control the primaries.

Instant runoff voting would also be helpful here, but I don't think it is enough. The primaries for the two major parties dominate the news cycle and third-party and independent candidate can't get any attention. Having all candidates compete together would help place all candidates on a level playing field.

Give People More Choices for Congress

Members of Congress are elected from single-member voting districts. This is called a "winner-take-all" system because the people who didn't vote for the winner (which could be more than half of the people) don't get any representation at all.

Let's use Massachusetts as an example, which has 9 members of Congress and 9 single-member districts. Here is the registration of Massachusetts voters:

• 1,526,870 Democrat (34%)
• 479,237 Republican (11%)
• 2,480,742 unaffiliated or other parties (55%)

Although Democrats make up only 34% of voters, all 9 members of Congress are Democrats. Even worse, the last time Massachusetts elected a non-Democrat to Congress was 1997. A huge chunk of Massachusetts voters have been completely unrepresented for 20 years.

The reason it is called a winner-take-all system is that the losers get nothing, no representation.

The solution is to use multi-member districts. Instead of 9 single-member districts, Massachusetts could have 3 districts that each elect 3 members. Under this scenario, the 3 districts would each be three times as large and have 3 times as many voters. Each voter could get one vote or could submit a ranked vote with the single transferable vote.

With multi-member districts, the elected candidates are more likely to represent the diverse views of the voters. For example, a 3-member district might elect 2 Democrats and 1 Republican. A 3-member district is also more likely to elect independents or third-party candidates. The key is that since multiple people are elected from the district, the multiple people are more likely to represent the views of the different voters in the district.

Why is it that we have single-member districts in the first place? I think there are two main reasons. First, the major parties like single-member districts because it gives them unfair advantage and allows them to suppress the other party and third parties. Second, there is an outdated notion that it is important to be geographically close to the person who represents you. Back in the days of horse and buggy, this made some sense. Nowadays, it is silly and they spend all of their time in Washington D.C. anyway.

These are my proposed solutions for changing our political system to give us a better chance of electing politicians who actually represent us. You may have a different view of the best way to do this and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. The key is that we have to do something!

OpaVote is excited to announce a new feature that we call guaranteed email delivery. When doing online voting, it is extremely important that voters receive their ballots, and OpaVote now goes to the extreme to make this happen. This is necessarily a complicated topic so please read to the end to understand our guarantee.

OpaVote provides managers with detailed information regarding the delivery of each email that is sent. Emails are in one of 4 states:

• Pending -- OpaVote hasn't yet sent the email. Emails get sent at a rate of 2 per second so it may take a little time for all the emails to be sent.
• In Transit -- OpaVote has sent the email but the receiving mail server hasn't decided whether to accept it yet.
• Rejected -- This can mean one of three things: (i) the email bounced, (ii) the voter opted out of receiving emails, or (iii) the voter marked the email as spam.
• Delivered -- The receiving mail server accepted the email, and nearly all of the time, the email will reach the voter's inbox.

1. An invalid email address (voter@gmail.cam).
2. A disabled account for a valid email address (e.g., a full inbox).
3. The receiving email server gets skittish and bounces the email as possible spam. We call this a skittish spam bounce.

• Only applies to elections of $20 or more.
• Notify us if any of your voters has a bounce reason that is a skittish spam bounce.
• We'll put our backup measures into place to get the email delivered.
• As a last resort, I'll send a voting email from my personal gmail account. If this email is not received, then the voter email address is not capable of receiving email.

We've added a new feature to our OpaVote Counts that has been a long time coming...

An OpaVote "Count" is the online equivalent of the old OpenSTV software that is no longer available, and a Count lets you count ranked ballots with 23 different counting methods (e.g., ranked-choice voting, instant runoff voting, or the single transferable vote), a variety of counting options, and withdrawing candidates.

With an OpaVote Count, you can now break ties manually. When you initially count the votes, any ties will be broken randomly. After the initial count, you can recount the votes, and in doing the recount you have the option to manually specify how ties are to be broken.



If your initial count had a tie, then you will something similar to the image above on your console. In this example, there was a tie:

• in Round 2 between Chocolate, Strawberry, and Cookies & Cream, and the tie was broken with a random selection of Cookies & Cream, and
• in Round 3 between Chocolate and Strawberry and the tie was broken with a random selection of Strawberry.

To better understand what is going on, it is helpful to view the current results in another browser tab or window. You can now change how the ties are broken. For example, for Round 2, you could uncheck Cookies & Cream and check Chocolate so that Chocolate was selected instead of Cookies & Cream, and you will see this when you recount the ballots.
Some important things to note:

• If you make an invalid selection, such as checking no candidates or checking more than one candidate, then the tie will be broken randomly.
• You can only change one tie break at a time, because changing one tie break will change all later ties in the count. For example, if you change the tie at Round 2 as indicated above, then the tie at Round 3 is now between Strawberry and Cookies & Cream.

OpaVote gets customers from all around the world who want to do online voting in many different languages. Previously, when election managers provided text in their own language, voters would see a mix of their own language and English.

We are excited to announce that OpaVote now fully supports elections in Spanish, French, and Portuguese! When setting up the election, the manager can choose his or her language, and this will cause OpaVote to send voting emails in that language and also present voting pages in that language. Your voters will see only their own language.

Here are some statistics I found regarding the number of people who speak a language (including non-native speakers):

• 510 million who speak English
• 420 million who speak Spanish
• 213 million who speak Portuguese
• 130 million who speak French

With this update, we've more than doubled the number of voters who can use OpaVote entirely in their own language.

These are the top candidates for future languages to be added to OpaVote:

• 1 billion speak Chinese
• 255 million speak Russian
• 230 million speak Arabic
• 229 million speak German
• 127 million speak Japanese

I've left off Hindi and Punjabi because I'm thinking many of these people speak English.  Let me know if I should add those to the list as well.

Sorry, for the silly title, but I couldn't think of good one for this post... In this post, I'll present a simple example of a set of 34 ballots where three different voting systems (plurality, instant runoff voting, and Condorcet) each select a different winner.

There are two points to showing this example.

First, the title relates to Arrow's Theorem, which loosely speaking, proves that all methods of counting votes are flawed in some way. It sounds fatalistic at first. How can we possibly elect our leaders if there is no right way of doing so?

Well, no voting system is perfect, but many of them are good. There are lot's of differences of opinion as to which voting system is "best" or should be used for different applications. Your organization needs to consider the options and select what you think is best (we have recommendations here, here, here, and here).

Second, your organization needs to be clear in stating which voting system will be used. Different voting systems can produce different results and you don't want a post election dispute over who the winners are! Even smaller changes to counting rules can affect the outcome so a good way to be precise is to state that San Francisco RCV or Scottish STV will be used (both of which are implemented by OpaVote).

Now let's get to the example that causes three different winners under plurality, IRV, and Condorcet. Note that, most of the time, most voting systems produce the same results so that this is definitely a contrived example.

Ballots

We have 34 ballots with 4 candidates who we will call A, B, C, and D. Here are the ballots:

• 10 voters rank B first, A second, C third, and D fourth
• 9 voters rank C first, A second, B third, and D fourth
• 8 voters ranks D first, A second, C third, and B fourth
• 7 voters rank A first, C second, D third, and B fourth

Plurality Voting

Instant Runoff Voting

Condorcet Voting

Sometimes it happens that an elected office becomes unexpectedly vacant. The person who held the office may resign, be kicked out, or have died. When this happens, the office may remain vacant until the next scheduled election or a special election or by-election may be held specifically to fill the vacant seat.

One cool feature about ranked-choice voting is that it is REALLY easy to reuse the ballots to fill a vacancy. This avoids the expense and hassle of having people come out to vote again to fill the vacancy. We'll address single-winner and multi-winner elections separately because there are different considerations.

IRV or Single-Winner RCV

STV or Multi-Winner RCV