Ranked Choice Voting

Alaskan voters will be voting on a ballot proposition that would change the way state and federal elections are calculated. The official ballot summary can be found here.

Instead of having a Republican Party primary and a Democratic Party primary and a separate system for undeclared or nonpartisan candidates, this ballot measure would have all candidates participate in the same primary system. Votes for this primary would operate the traditional way with each voter selecting only their top choice. The top 4 candidates would move forward to the general election.

The general election is where the system changes the most. Instead of voters only selecting their top choice, they get to rank all the candidates in preference order. Unlike traditional voting, a candidate cannot win until they have reached over 50% of the votes. If no candidate has over 50% of the votes, the lowest candidate is eliminated and anyone who voted for them now has their second place vote counted instead. This process continues until there is a winner.

You could have students read the proposition text, the summary text, and information from groups for and against the proposition.

For this lesson we are going to make and use customized voting chips so that students can easily track what is happening to their vote. I will show the process for using a Glowforge to have students make custom voting chips but this could be done in many other ways. I have included a file with many pre-made shapes which could be used on any laser. I painted the sheets of wood before cutting out the shapes to make it easy to compare votes but for more engagement students could be given a limited set of colors and could decorate their own voting chips.

Give students a sticky note and a Sharpie marker. It doesn’t have to be a Sharpie but the Glowforge does a really good job with them and might not do as well with other markers. Have students draw the outline of a shape on their sticky note. You can add restrictions or requirements to the shapes as fit your class and content. The shape should be a closed shape to give it some volume. 

I recommend having students write their name or initials in small letters on the back of their sticky note using pencil. This can help connect the shapes to the students if any of them forget which shape was theirs.

Have students put their sticky notes on a group page so that the sticky notes overlap but the shapes don’t. Put this in the Glowforge.

Make a selection rectangle around the shapes. 

You will then need to click the inside of each shape so that the laser will cut it out. 

Select the appropriate settings for your material, align the shapes, and have it cut out the pieces. Use the same designs and print 3 more sets of identical shapes. Distribute the pieces to students and if you didn’t already color the material, have them decorate their pieces with a set color theme so that each student four identical colors on four of the same shapes. For my example I’m using red, blue, white, and gold.

I like having students explain their shape to me. If they selected a simple shape this can be easy but some of them may need to discuss several shapes that they combined into one shape. They can also reference objects that have a similar shape.

Now that students have voting chips you can hold an election. You can decide if you want to have a primary or if you would like to go directly to the general. Select something that your class would have knowledge of and have them come up with things to vote on. This could be restaurants in the area, super heroes, cartoon characters, books, school topics, etc. One thing to keep in mind is that a classroom is a very small sample size so if you have too many candidates in the primary you will probably end up with a lot of ties and it will make it difficult to tell which candidates should move to the general election. I recommend stopping after the first 6-8 candidates are on the list.

If you are running a general election, hold the vote with a secret ballot and the top 4 candidates will move to the general.

Assign each of the 4 candidates a color that matches one of the student voting tokens. I recommend having them written on the board. Have each student rank the candidates by stacking their tokens with their top choice on top and their last choice on the bottom. Do not make students include all four choices as voters will not be required to rank all candidates. Have students bring their voting stack to a common place in the room that has enough room around it for your students to view. You could also use a document camera if you have one.

Tally up the count for each candidate. There are 32 votes so a candidate needs 17 votes to win (half the votes plus 1). In the example there are 9 votes for blue, 10 for white, 6 for red, and 7 for gold. No candidate had at least 17 votes so we eliminate the votes for the last place candidate, in this case red. According to current Alaska law, if there is a tie, the winner should be decided by a coin flip.

After removing the candidate in last place, recount the votes. In the example there are 11 votes for blue, 13 for white, and 8 for gold. Again, no candidate has at least 17 votes. Gold is in last so we remove all of the gold votes. 

After doing this there are some red votes showing but red was already eliminated so we remove them as well.

We can now do our last and final count. In the example blue has 14 votes and white has 18 so white would be declared the winner.

Included in this lesson is a spreadsheet which models 13,071 voters ranking 4 candidates. I selected 13,071 voters as according to the 2010 census that was the average number of voting age residents that should reside in each district. To see a new “election” press the F9 key at the top of your keyboard. By default the votes are random so you won’t see much distinction between any candidates. There are peach colored cells near the top left of the sheet that you can add a modifier to. If you add a positive value it will make that candidate more likely to be ranked higher and a negative number will make it less likely.

If you are in an online environment this same idea could work but with either colored sticky notes, colored paper, or paper colored by the students. They could hold their stack of votes to the camera and eliminate selections the same as you would with the voting chips.