(Addendum: Science Cafe NH in Concord for January will talk about alternative voting. We discussed it just a year but it looks like there’s still a ton of interest in the topic. Science Cafe takes December off.)

My little ranked-choice-voting experiment with the Democratic presidential primary has proven popular, even though I made people cut out ballots from the physical newspaper and snail-mail them in. (Digital subscribers could print out the ballot from their PDF version of the paper.)

As you may recall, we created a ranked-choice version of the ballot with 16 hopefuls, and will tally the results in early December, after Thanksgiving break. I’m not trying to predict the winner, I’m just doing this as a fun experiment to see how this unusual (to us, anyway) voting system operates.

Well over 100 ballots have come in, to the point where I’m fretting about how long it’s going to take me to hand-calculate them. I’ve gotten several requests from alternative-voting fans for online versions so they could play, too, but I said no. I limited this to print to avoid getting swamped by fans of one hopeful.

Not everybody is delighted, however. Here’s an email I got this morning:

Looking at all those circles on the sample ranked voting makes my eyes wonky! How can ranked voting with so many candidates be even remotely accurate?

Thank you for doing that. That confirms my vote against ranked voting.