The limitations of Plurality Voting: An illustration

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eaton's picture
Are you at least 13 years old?
14% (1 vote)
Are you a programmer?
57% (4 votes)
Are you a Drupal user?
29% (2 votes)
Total votes: 7

Comments

Very good example

augustin's picture

Better than mine, and much more concise, too :)

--
www.reuniting.info
Healing with Sexual Relationships.
www.wechange.org
We live in a world of solutions.

.

--
www.reuniting.info
Healing with Sexual Relationships.
www.wechange.org
We live in a world of solutions.

Where is the 4th option?

markus_petrux's picture

None of the above :p

...just taking a walk around here. :)

Precisely!

eaton's picture

Plurality voting's drawback, as you've noted, is that it artificially forces users into options that may not suit them well, and may also mask important data. The polls themselves must be written VERY carefully to avoid begging-the-question, and that tends to lead to ballot-bloat, with each response trying to encompass a particular combination of votes rather than a discrete vote.

Anyhow, yes. None of the above -- or all of the above! ;)

What about CowboyNeal?

grohk's picture

Has anyone looked into how the the quiz or decisions modules in contrib work? It seems to me that most people use the poll module for fun, not serious information collection. Perhaps these modules could help implement this functionality without over complicating the core (soon to be contrib from what I read) poll.module.

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