Loomio

Beta release: Single Transferrable Vote based Elections

Robert Guthrie Fri 12 Jun 2026 9:00AMPublicSeen by 178

We added this a month or two back, but I'm catching up on all the things I need to communicate and ask for feedback on.

We've developed Single Transferrable Vote style election polls in Loomio, with the help and input of the NYC DSA.

It should be considered Beta quality.

If you do decide to run an STV election with Loomio, I'll do my best to support you and fix any issues that show up. I don't expect any issues with recording votes - the complexity and newness is in how we calculate the results.

I recommend running a small test election and kicking the tires before launching it with your whole group.

https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/polls/stv/index.html

The help documentation is literally just AI generated. I apologise. If you take the time to give me feedback or ask questions, I'd be very grateful and be sure to do my best with it.

Actually now that I mention it.. we should probably run a fake election in here to test it out... I might launch one soon.

Robert GuthrieSun 14 Jun 2026 9:35PM

@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 GuthrieMon 15 Jun 2026 8:21AM

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

Edward BaintonMon 15 Jun 2026 9:44AM

@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?)

Robert GuthrieMon 15 Jun 2026 10:08AM

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

Robert GuthrieSun 14 Jun 2026 9:45PM

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.