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Teaching STAR Voting — a guide for presenters, teachers & organizers

Explaining STAR to a class, a club, a city council, or a skeptical uncle? This page collects what actually works — the order to teach it in, the terms to cover (and how to phrase them), which examples to reach for, the misconceptions to head off, and how to run a live demo. It's the presenter's companion to the learner-facing STAR — start here.

Level: reference · for presenters

Where to start depends on who's in the room

There are two orders. The dividing line is not how smart or informed the audience is — it's whether they showed up already wanting the answer.

Problem first — for people who didn't choose to be there

A rally, a city council, a club meeting, a skeptical uncle over dinner. Nobody there asked for a lecture on voting methods, so until they feel a problem, ballot mechanics are trivia. Lead with the failure of the way we vote now, let it land, then produce STAR as the fix:

  1. A problem they already know — vote-splitting. The team-lunch story: everyone's happy with Pizza, but "pick one" splits the vote and buries it. Now they want a fix.
  2. STAR in one breath — score 0–5 (like Yelp), then the top two have an automatic runoff.
  3. Watch it fix the same problem — re-run the lunch; the compromise wins.
  4. The ballot — show a real one; "there's no wrong way to fill it out."
  5. Why two rounds — the one idea worth pausing on (scores find the contenders; the runoff picks the winner).

Mechanics first — for people who opted in

A class that signed up for it, someone who asked you how STAR works, a reader who clicked "learn about STAR." They arrived carrying the why already. Open with a plurality lesson and you've answered a question they didn't ask — spending your best minute on somebody else's method while they wait for yours. Give them STAR immediately (ballot → two rounds → one worked count), and save the Choose-One contrast for the end, where it lands as a payoff rather than a grievance. That's exactly how the learner-facing STAR — start here is built, so use it as a handout, not as a script for the arc above.

Choosing, in the moment

Mixed room, genuinely unsure? Ask them: "Show of hands — who's ever watched a vote get split?" Hands up means they own the problem; go problem-first. Blank looks mean they came for the mechanics; give them the mechanics.

Everything else (criteria, comparisons, theory) is optional depth for the audience that wants it.

A caution that applies to both orders. Opening with "the way you've always voted is broken" tells people their lifelong ballot was foolish, and frames STAR as a grievance product. STAR is unusual among reforms in being pleasant on its own terms — Yelp stars, then a final — so it doesn't need an enemy to be attractive. Even in the problem-first arc, the target is the ballot, never the voters who used it.

Terms to make sure you cover (and how to say them)

Term Say it like this
Score 0–5 "Rate each candidate like a Yelp review — 5 for a favorite, 0 for a hard no, anything in between."
Scoring Round "Add up everyone's stars. The two highest-scoring candidates become the finalists."
Finalists "The top two — the only ones left in the final step."
Automatic Runoff "A built-in final round — no second trip to the polls. Each ballot counts as one vote for whichever finalist it scored higher."
Equal Support "If you rated the two finalists the same, you're saying 'either is fine' — your ballot still counted in the scoring round."
Vote-splitting / spoiler "The problem STAR solves — where similar candidates split support and the wrong one wins."

Reach for these only with an audience that wants depth: Condorcet winner, monotonicity, summability, the honest limits. Skip them for a first-timer — they're 201/301, not the on-ramp.

Which example, and when

Use… For…
The team lunch your go-to intro — 5 voters, politics-free, relatable, and the compromise wins.
Tennessee capital the classic textbook case — same shape as the lunch, at scale.
Runoff reversal the "aha" — the top scorer can lose the runoff. The most important single lesson; use it after the basics land.
Ways to vote reassuring voters there's no wrong ballot (bullet, equal scores, "anyone but…").
Count by hand a hands-on demystifier — tally a tiny election live.
Center squeeze only when the room asks "why not RCV/IRV?"

Tips & tricks

  • Keep examples tiny. 3–5 voters. A big electorate hides the point; a 5-voter example you can hold in your head wins.
  • Use ONE running cast the whole talk. Don't switch from Sushi/Tacos/Pizza to Alice/Bob/Carol mid-session — it forces the audience to re-load. (New scenario? New memorable cast; within a scenario, keep it.)
  • Stay politics-free for mixed rooms. Lunch, ice cream, movies. The moment you use real parties, half the room stops listening and starts defending. Make the method the hero, not a candidate.
  • Do a live count. Either hand-tally a 3-voter election on the board, or run a real poll of the room on bettervoting.com and reveal the result. Participation beats slides.
  • Preempt the five misconceptions before they derail you:
  • "Isn't it just averaging?" — No; the runoff is what makes it a majority method, not a mean.
  • "Do I have to rate everyone?" — No; blanks count as 0, bullet-voting is fine.
  • "Isn't giving a 0 wasting my vote?" — No; a 0 is a real score, and you never split your own vote.
  • "Is the runoff a second election?" — No; it's automatic, computed from the same ballots.
  • "Won't everyone just give all 5s and 0s?" — The runoff removes the payoff for that, so honest scoring is also the smart move.

(Hand your audience the full set: Common misunderstandings about STAR.) - Concede a limit — on purpose. "No method is perfect (that's a theorem)" and naming one honest limit builds trust; overselling loses the skeptics. - Match depth to the audience (see curriculum pacing): a 15-min public talk = the problem-first arc and stop; officials = add summability & audits; skeptics/debaters = honest limits + the criteria. - End with a call to action — have them cast a real STAR ballot or run their own poll before they leave.

The repo has a tool that turns a BetterVoting election into print-ready paper ballots — bv_ballot_sheet.py. One route: create the election on BetterVoting, export its JSON, and print from that export — so the ballot's QR and results link are always real:

python3 STARVote_LH_tabulation_engine/tools_adam/bv_ballot_sheet.py \
    --bv-export "06_Other/_demo_dropbox/<election>-<id>.json" \
    --serials --write-ins 1 --copies 25 --verify-bv --out pets.pdf

The ballot is styled after the official Equal Vote STAR ballot (STAR VOTING header, bulleted instructions, Worst/Best labels, star column headers, zebra stripes, finalist footer), so it's instantly familiar. The output is a print-ready PDF (--out ballots.pdf), one ballot per page. The fun parts:

  • two QR codes → scan to vote and scan for results, so a class can vote on paper and online and compare;
  • optional serial "receipts" (--serials) — a lovely way to teach verifiability and the secret-ballot tension (publish the counted serials; discuss why a name→number list would be bad);
  • optional write-in rows (--write-ins N), a --logo for the real STAR / chapter logo, and --promo / --chapter for a footer, and --verify-bv so no one scans a dead link.

The full walkthrough — the create → export → print → vote → count loop, the print checklist, the three ways to count the result, and the ready-made pet / meta_pets / beer / ice cream elections — is Run a paper-ballot STAR demo.

Running a real hand-count (for organizers)

For an actual election, STAR is genuinely hand-countable. The Equal Vote Coalition's official procedure is worth following: BetterVoting — Hand Counting STAR. The gist:

  • Scoring round: a caller reads each ballot aloud, a verifier confirms, and one tallier per star-level (five talliers) marks tally sheets; multiply each tally by its star value and sum. An observer watches for errors.
  • Runoff: sort every ballot into three piles — prefers finalist A, prefers finalist B, or no preference (Equal Support) — and count the piles. (This pile-sort is also the fastest way to demo the runoff live.)
  • Practical tips from the guide: train on test ballots (fake names / colored paper) first; record the total ballot count before you start; use a big-display calculator; a straight-edge keeps tally rows aligned; a stencil covering the non-finalists speeds the runoff sort.

The conceptual walkthrough is Count a STAR election by hand; why it scales (precinct-summable, unlike IRV) is summability.

Ready-made materials

Audience quick-adaptations

  • Classroom / kids → mechanics first (they're already signed up): the lunch, a live hand-count, colored-paper "candidates." Pure mechanics, no theory.
  • Voters / general public → problem first: the five-step arc + ways to vote ("no wrong ballot") + a live poll.
  • Officials / administrators → summability, hand-count, audits; skip the criteria theory.
  • Skeptics / debaters / RCV advocates → honest limits, criteria at a glance, STAR vs RCV-IRV. Concede limits first — it's disarming.