Beta release: Single Transferrable Vote based Elections

I would like a toilet book of Mr Guthrie's placeholder text across various tests.
I don't think I've really understood the purpose of STV when we can just vote on each option separately with a lovely scale. What if I basically equally love Ms. Buttonsworth and Mx. Threadsworth, but despise the guts of the next candidate? I want to express the 'distance' of preference between them all..

I got really excited about the email notification for this for a moment, thinking it was adding the feature of transferring my vote to someone else (liquid/ delegative democracy) am I right in thinking there was an experiment with that once in Loomio?
I cannot believe how under served that space is. I've only been able to find like 1.5 apps on earth that allow me to create a Liquid democracy group/ community : /

@Luke Flegg - Glad you're excited about it.

I have personally never met a group doing meaningful work that has asked for LD.

I don't think it is a chicken and egg type issue either - my hunch is that the LD experience isn't what most people consider good facilitation.

I was able to build STV because I had the support of a group practicing it. My read is that STV is simple but expressive and suits the purpose of traditional elections.

Now that agentic coding is so powerful you could easily prompt it (LD) into existence, but I think the job of product management is even more so about managing complexity - so I'm hesitant to invest any time in it until I hear of (even the beginning of) real demand for LD.

@Robert Guthrie 

I have personally never met a group doing meaningful work that has asked for LD.

Whether or not this counts as "meaningful work" is a matter of opinion, but there was (is?) the German Pirate Party. For whom Liquid Feedback was developed, or at least they made heavy use of it.

Which points to the fact that delegation only becomes really useful at the scale of an enormous organisation. Both in terms of raw numbers, and the numbe of active subgroups and other substructures whose views need to be represented in decision-making. There just aren't many organisations at that scale who make centralised decisions, and have an interest in doing so democratically.

From what I've observed, the organisations using Loomio seem to be mostly at a much smaller scale than that. Or, they're diffuse networks, organising themselves such that very few (if any) whole-of-org decisions need to be made. In hindsight, this is probably one of the reasons why my attempt to bootstrap an Aotearoa General Assembly in the early days of Loomio didn't come to anything ; )

@Luke Flegg - I sometimes surprise myself by being so dismissive. Sorry. I do have this:
https://github.com/loomio/loomio/issues/7641#issuecomment-2918240135

@Robert Guthrie 

I sometimes surprise myself by being so dismissive.

I'm glad you're able to reflect on that. This will serve you well 😊

@Luke Flegg 
> I want to express the 'distance' of preference between them all..

I think you could express that with a scoring poll, currently an option. You can give every option (candidate) a score from 0 to X

(There used to be a dot poll, which might be the same thing?)

@Edward Bainton Dot vote was renamed to Allocate. I should mention that in it's description

Hrmm.. it took me a minute to sense check the results, but they look correct. I was initially confused because I only saw 4 votes (the ones with reason statements), but when I clicked View all votes, I did indeed see 5 first choices for McGee, 2 for McVoteface, etc.

So my take away from this is there is still some minor UI tweaks that could improve the experience (both in voting and displaying results), but the implementation is technically correct and working reasonably well.

Would love you hear what you who participated think.