Beta release: Single Transferrable Vote based Elections

that felt quite natural....

It did .

I don’t know how easy, but it would be a bit better for me if the line itself doesn’t respond to touch/drag. That was unintuitive: I expect to move the candidates, but by dragging the line by accident I almost inadvertently unvoted them. It should spring into place when I drag the candidate above it, but not be draggable itself

But this is a nice to have: it works well as is, it’s pretty obvious whether you’ve voted for all candidates or not (and great that you don’t have to vote for all of them)

One feature of my organization's STV voting is to include an explicit "None / No Other Candidate" option as a ballot choice. This allows a voter to explicitly declare a preference for either NONE or for a limited number of seats to be filled.

If I as a voter prefer that the position not be filled at all I would rank "None / No Other Candidate" as #1. I may also list preferences below that that if I wish to.

Alternatively, if I as a voter want the election to fill only 3 seats when there are 5 available seats to be elected I would rank "None / No Other Candidate" as number 4. I may also list preferences below that if I wish to.

Having such an explicit ballot choice is enshrined in our bylaws for all votes that are not YES/NO/ABSTAIN votes.

My organization presently simply places such a "None / No Other Candidate" choice on a Ranked Choice or STV ballot as if it was another "human" on the ballot. But I wonder if this option may have bearing on how Loomio presents/tabulates the STV voting.

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.

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

@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.