The vote for "TV, Movie, or Showtune" Play It Your Way was very close. There was a deadlock between "Moon River" and "Over the Rainbow" until the very last day of voting. To help prevent ties in the future, I'm considering using Ranked Choice Voting, a system championed by democracy reformers. Here's how it works:
Even if the calculation is harder (but not really, since I could just use a spreadsheet to do it), the voting process is still easy, though it requires everyone to rank their choices. So for example, my ballot for the last PIYW looked like this:
1 - Send in the Clowns
1 - Somewhere Over The Rainbow
1 - Moon River
0 - Don't Cry for Me, Argentina
1 - You'll Be Back
1 - Golden
With Ranked Choice Voting, I would have to rank my choices like this:
5th - Send in the Clowns
3rd - Somewhere Over The Rainbow
4th - Moon River
0 - Don't Cry for Me, Argentina
2nd - You'll Be Back
1st - Golden
(Don't Cry For Me Argentina still gets "0" because I would most likely skip it if it got chosen.) Notice that, even though I ranked "Over The Rainbow" 3rd, my vote would still have an effect on the outcome. "Golden" and "You'll Be Back" would be very quickly eliminated (since no one else voted for them), and my top vote from the third round or so would be "Over The Rainbow".
There is a procedure for ties, and it involves looking at the ranks before resorting to a coin-flip. Here's a more detailed explanation.
I could set up a google sheet that would show up-to-date results as voting continued. I would have to manually add everyone's votes to the sheet, but I don't mind that. Would everyone be okay with this new voting method?
