Voting methods

Democratia supports two methods. Both are counted the same way every time and can be recomputed from the stored ballots at any point.

Ranked preference

Every option gets a position, exactly once. Position 1 is your favourite.

The voting screen gives you three ways to do it, all of which write to the same input:

• Drag an option to a new position.
• Up and down buttons on every row, reachable by keyboard, with focus following the moved row.
• A position dropdown on every row, which is the actual form field.

Because the dropdown is the real input, the ballot submits correctly with JavaScript disabled — you would set positions by hand instead of dragging.

Borda count

With n options, first place is worth n − 1 points, second n − 2, and last place none.

With four options:

An option that everybody puts second can beat an option that half the voters put first and half put last. That is the method working as intended: it rewards broad acceptability over polarisation. If you want the option with the most first-place votes to win outright, ranked preference is the wrong method.

What the server checks

Nothing about the submitted ballot is trusted. Before a single row is written, the server requires that:

• every option in the poll appears exactly once,
• no option appears twice,
• no option belongs to a different poll,
• no position is duplicated, and
• the positions form a complete run from 1 to n.

The database enforces the last two independently: one preference per option per ballot, and one option per position per ballot.

Approval

You select the options you approve of. Each selection is worth one point. The results page also shows what share of ballots approved each option.

• At least one selection is required. An empty approval ballot would be indistinguishable from not voting at all.
• No more than the poll's limit. The interface disables extra checkboxes once you reach it, but that is only a courtesy — the server checks the limit again, because a disabled checkbox protects nothing.
• Duplicate and foreign options are rejected, as with ranked ballots.

How ties are resolved

Two options can genuinely be tied, and Democratia says so rather than inventing a winner.

For ranked polls, in order:

1. Higher total score.
2. More first places. Still level? More second places. Still level? Third, and so on down every position.
3. A tie. Options that cannot be separated share a position and are labelled as tied.

For approval polls there is no second step. Equal approvals is a tie, because nothing in an approval ballot distinguishes two options that the same number of people approved.

Two things are deliberately never used as tie-breakers:

• Submission time. Whoever voted first would silently win. That is not a democratic outcome, it is an accident of timing.
• Randomness. A result must be reproducible from the stored ballots. Roll a die and it is not.

The owner's results page shows the tie-break breakdown: for each pair of otherwise level options, which position separated them, or that nothing could.

A worked example

Three options, five ballots, ranked preference:

With three options, first place is worth 2 and second 1.

• Alpha — three firsts, two thirds: 3 × 2 = 6
• Beta — two firsts, two seconds: (2 × 2) + (2 × 1) = 6
• Gamma — three seconds: 3 × 1 = 3

Alpha and Beta are level on 6. Alpha had three first places against Beta's two, so Alpha wins on the first tie-break. The results page reports exactly that, naming position 1 as what separated them.