Q: Why not just ask voters to indicate one favorite choice and rank the choices according to the number of votes for each choice?

 A:  To see what's wrong with this approach, suppose you ask 10 coworkers to rank the importance of four budget categories, and you get these voting results:

With the documentation and customer training category getting only one vote, it's tempting to conclude that this category deserves the smallest concern and budget.  But what if the other nine voters regard this category as second-most important?

Allowing the voters to fully rank the same categories could easily produce these full-ranking results.

Notice that documentation and customer training is actually the second-most important category, and engineering is actually the least-important category!  Allowing voters to fully rank your choices can reveal such useful insights.

 Q: How can full-ranking results be used?

 A:  You can directly use full-ranking results to guide your decisions about budgets, priorities, or whatever you ranked.  Use common sense when interpreting the results; in particular, do not focus excessive attention on the “winning” choice, and do not excessively neglect the least-preferred choice.

When unexpected results arise, start a discussion to understand the preferences of your group members.  In the above budget example (where full ranking reveals the unexpected importance of documentation and customer training) a discussion of the results could easily lead to important insights such as these:

• Improvements in documentation and customer training could reduce the demand for customer service.
• Marketing, engineering, and customer service depend on good documentation as a bridge between how engineers design a product and how customers use the product.
• User-interface aspects of engineering design deserve increased attention and financial support.

Notice that collecting all the preferences of all the voters reveals insights that are easily overlooked if only first choices are considered.

 Q: What do the results look like?

 A:  Here is a sample result summary.  The Traditional vote count column shows that the traditional interpretation (“the-more-votes-the-more-popular”) would be quite misleading in this case.

Popularity	Choice	VoteFair ranking score	Traditional vote count (for comparison)
First-most popular	Tea
Second-most popular	Soda
Third-most popular	Coffee
Fourth-most popular	Beer or wine

In this example involving 10 people, tea is correctly identified as the most popular drink.  In this survey it is not anyone's favorite drink, but it is everyone's second choice.  (Detailed results here)

 Q: Why are full-ranking results so often different from results based on traditional voting methods?

 A:  Expressed in terms of voting concepts, full ranking overcomes these common, yet mistaken, beliefs:

• Myth: The choice with the most first-choice votes is most popular.
• Myth: The choice with the fewest first-choice votes is least popular.

The only way to ensure completely representative results is to ask all the voters for all their preferences.

 Q: Why bother voting in decision-making situations?  Why not simply impose top-down management?

 A:  Here at FullRanking.com you have access to the collective intelligence of the people in your group.  Use that intelligence and this full-ranking resource to discover some surprisingly valuable insights.  Ask your co-workers, employees, customers, project members, and others to gather here to share their knowledge, insights, and wisdom through ranking-oriented decision-making.  But instead of just identifying a single top priority, choice, or budget category, discover the full range that is otherwise hidden. 

 Q: Is there an alternative to having everyone vote online?

 A:  Yes, you can print copies of the ballot and ask group members to mark them using a pencil or pen.  Then you (or someone else) can transcribe the marks from the paper ballots into online ballots.  (If desired, some voters can vote using paper ballots and other voters can vote online.)

 Q: Is my information safe and secure?

 A:  Yes, your information is kept private and is reasonably secure.  Protection from unauthorized access cannot be guaranteed, so if you have critical security or confidentiality concerns, please contact us about secure alternatives (or use nondescript choice names such as alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, and kappa).

 Q: The choice names are numbered.  Does this mean I need to enter the choice names in a specific order?

 A:  You can enter the choice names in whatever order you want them to appear on the ballot.  The reason letters (A, B, C, D, E) are not used is because in a meeting the sound-alike letters (Bee, Cee, Dee, and Eee) would cause confusion.  The numerical approach allows you to collect preferences verbally, and this allows a voter to say “I prefer three, then one, then four, then two.”  (The use of numbers also prepares for the future when voting via cell phone will become commonplace.)

 Q: How are the ranking results calculated?

 A:  The full rankings are calculated using a method called VoteFair ranking.  Unlike every other voting method, this method takes into account all the preferences of all the voters.

The best way to understand how the calculations are done is to look at the results page for a real ranking situation.  The details at the bottom of the results show how the votes are tallied (counted), and how those tallies are used to calculate scores for each possible ranking order, with the highest score indicating the ranking order that best matches the voter preferences.  (Don't expect this brief explanation to make sense until you've seen a results page.)

Each results page also shows how the same voter preferences would be interpreted using plurality voting, instant-runoff voting (IRV), and other voting methods.

Here is a sample results page that demonstrates a situation in which traditional plurality voting (“the choice with the most votes is the most popular”) designates a winning choice that is actually the third-most-popular choice.  VoteFair ranking correctly ranks all the choices.

 Q: Where can I get more information about VoteFair ranking?

 A:  The www.VoteFair.org website provides additional information, but the best way to understand it better is to try it!