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Count a STAR election by hand

One of STAR's quiet superpowers: you can tally it with a pencil, paper, and grade-school arithmetic — no computer required. This page walks you through counting a real STAR election by hand, start to finish, so "STAR is simple and hand-countable" stops being a claim and becomes something you've actually done.

Level: 101 · for voters You'll need only the two rounds: add the stars, then count the runoff.

What you're counting

A stack of ballots. Each ballot has a 0–5 score for every candidate (blank counts as 0). That's it. We'll use the team-lunch election — 5 voters choosing Sushi, Tacos, or Pizza:

              Sushi  Tacos  Pizza
  Ballot 1      5      0      3
  Ballot 2      5      0      3
  Ballot 3      0      5      3
  Ballot 4      0      5      3
  Ballot 5      3      1      5

Round 1 — the Scoring Round: add up the stars

Go down each column and add. That's the whole first round.

              Sushi  Tacos  Pizza
  add the      5+5+   0+0+   3+3+
  column   =   0+0+   5+5+   3+3+
               3      1      5
  ─────────   ────   ────   ────
  TOTAL         13     11     17
  • Sushi 13, Tacos 11, Pizza 17.
  • Circle the two highest totals — those are the finalists: Pizza (17) and Sushi (13). Tacos is out.

That's it for Round 1: addition and picking the top two.

Round 2 — the Automatic Runoff: one vote per ballot

Now look only at the two finalists (Pizza and Sushi) and go ballot by ballot. On each ballot, whichever finalist got the higher score earns one tally mark. (If a ballot scored both finalists the same, it's Equal Support — no mark for either; it still counted in Round 1.)

            Sushi  Pizza   higher?        mark
  Ballot 1    5      3      Sushi          Sushi ✓
  Ballot 2    5      3      Sushi          Sushi ✓
  Ballot 3    0      3      Pizza          Pizza ✓
  Ballot 4    0      3      Pizza          Pizza ✓
  Ballot 5    3      5      Pizza          Pizza ✓
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────
  TALLY:                   Pizza 3  ·  Sushi 2

Pizza 3, Sushi 2 — Pizza wins. More voters preferred Pizza head-to-head, so Pizza takes it. Done — you just hand-counted a STAR election.

(Cross-check: this matches the live BetterVoting result and the engine exactly — Pizza 17 in scoring, Pizza 3–2 in the runoff.)

The whole recipe, on one card

  1. Add each candidate's column of scores → totals.
  2. Top two totals = the finalists.
  3. For each ballot, one mark to whichever finalist it scored higher (equal = no mark).
  4. Most marks wins. (Exact tie → the tie-break rules.)

Why this scales — the part that matters for real elections

For one room, count it directly as above. For a big election across many precincts, STAR has a property IRV lacks: it's summable. Each precinct can report two small, fixed-size tables —

  • the score totals per candidate, and
  • the preference matrix (for each pair of candidates, how many voters preferred each) —

and those tables simply add up across precincts to give the national result. You never have to ship every ballot to one place. That's why STAR can be hand-counted and risk-limiting-audited at scale.

Contrast RCV-IRV: because it eliminates candidates round by round and transfers votes, a precinct can't publish a subtotal that adds up — every ballot has to reach a central count, and a single changed ballot can cascade. STAR's "add, then compare the top two" is genuinely a pencil-and-paper method; IRV's is not.

A faster runoff for a big stack: sort into three piles

Instead of marking each ballot one by one, sort the whole stack into three piles — prefers finalist A, prefers finalist B, and Equal Support (scored them the same) — then just count the two preference piles. That's the method the Equal Vote Coalition's official procedure uses, along with role assignments (a caller, a verifier, one tallier per star-level) and practical tips (train on test ballots, use a straight-edge to keep tally rows aligned): BetterVoting — Hand Counting STAR. Teaching it to a group? See Teaching STAR Voting.

Try it yourself

See also