IMD Affiliates Introduce New Voting Method

IMD affiliates Wesley Holliday from UC Berkeley and Eric Pacuit from University of Maryland have launched a website implementing a new voting method called Stable Voting. This method uses ranked ballots and always chooses the candidate who ranks above all others in head-to-head match-ups, if there is one. The website allows users to make polls of their own, auto-generate a link to send to all voters, and then tally the results using Stable Voting. The site also provides an explanation of why a particular candidate won, and because the Stable Voting algorithm is recursive, it allows users to follow through the recursion, providing visualizations at each stage. The goal of the site is to translate academic research on voting into a beneficial public service, as well as to improve our understanding of voting through the study of real elections. The creators have observed many phenomena of interest to voting theorists by analyzing over a hundred elections of varying sizes. You can find more details in their recent paper here.