Using first place votes as tiebreaker

[Ann Homstad]

Hi--

We run an election that has about 450 eligible voters.  The purpose is to decide multiple nonprofit recipients for large grants.  Our voters rank 5 candidates using the Borda Count method. We make them rank all 5 candidates.  Each candidate receives a grant but a tie at the bottom of the rankings can mean the difference between receiving $100,00 vs. a lower merit award.

We've never had a tie.  But if we did, our current policy would be to break the tie by seeing which candidate had the most first place votes.  I know we can download the ballots.  Does anyone already have a way to count just the first place votes?  Could we use a Count in OpaVote to help with this?  It would be fine to count the first place votes for each of the five candidates if that was simpler.  We would then simply compare the results between the two tied candidates.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts--

Ann Homstad

[Team OpaVote]

Hello Ann,

There is actually a very simple way to do this in OpaVote.

On the results page for your contest, click the "Recount Ballots" button. In the method selector choose the "Single Winner" checkbox method. Then click the "Recount Ballots" button.

OpaVote will recount the ballots as if it were a single-winner election with checkbox voting, using each voter's first choice. You can hover over the results graph to see how many votes each candidate has to then determine which candidate in the tie has the most votes.

You can experiment with that feature on our demo election for Most Valuable Player. It is a Condorcet election, not Borda, but the process is the same.

You can also try it with a test election you create. All elections with up to 25 voters and 10 candidates are free.

Best,
-- Damien
Team OpaVote
https://opavote.com

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