Range Voting using Zoho Polls

One of our users of Zoho Polls has created this wonderful poll to demonstrate Range Voting.

https://www.zoho.com//brokenladder/2008-u-s-presidential-election-poll-using

We used to call it a rating poll, which is a type of range voting. From the above poll, we came to know about range voting and got introduced to rangevoting.org, the Center for Range Voting (CRV). Its goals are to educate the public about the advantages of range voting and comparative disadvantages of other systems and to lobby for its adoption.

We have always felt that range voting is the best approach to arrive at a general consensus. We have ourselves used this rating approach to decide on home page designs, song selection for performances, rating the food, deciding on the name of a product / service that we are building, etc.

As per the description of the poll featured above:

This mock election should help gain insight into the 2008 U.S. Presidential race, as well as demonstrate the superiority of Range Voting to other voting methods.

Rate any candidates you want to. You can just ignore any candidate that you don't care about, or don't know enough about to vote on; your non-vote simply won't affect that candidate. The candidate with the highest average rating wins. Simple, huh?!

Finally, notice something interesting about this election? We're running several candidates, giving voters real choice. With Range Voting, you don't get the kind of Perot/Nader spoiler effect, where voting for a "third party" candidate effectively works as a vote for your least favorite candidate. That's a quality that you won't find in other alternative voting methods, like instant runoff voting.

That is the power of range voting. You get to rate each item in the poll and the one with the highest average rating wins. This will be inline with the general consensus of the voters. Visit rangevoting.org for more details.

That said, the normal voting / plurality voting poll is also useful in different scenarios. The type of poll basically depends on your need.

Here is a pie chart which depicts the percentage split-up of voting and rating polls created by the users of Zoho Polls. Even though the number of rating polls is less than voting polls, 37% is still a very good number.

Poll types usage in Zoho Polls - https://www.zoho.com/docs/sheet.html?

Chart powered by https://www.zoho.com/docs/sheet.html?

We are also discussing with rangevoting.org and betterpolls.com, another poll service, on how we can work together for the improvement of the service.

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