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STAR Voting — resources & further watching

A curated set of good outside explainers, videos, and official guides for STAR Voting. Most are made by advocates (Equal Vote / STAR Voting and allied groups) — read them for the clear explanations, and keep this library's honest-limits pages beside them for the caveats. For the runnable, example-first version of everything below, start with STAR — start here.

Watch (short → longer)

Official guides & explainers

  • Equal Vote Coalition — STAR — the canonical rules and the "equally weighted vote" framing (the source this repo defers to for ballot rules).
  • STAR Voting Voter's Guide — a visual-first voter guide: "5 = best, 0 = worst," an infographic of the count, and a myth-busting FAQ ("it's safe to vote your conscience," "leaving a candidate blank doesn't waste your vote"). Available in Spanish. A good model for explaining the ballot to first-time voters.
  • starvoting.org — the campaign hub (get-involved framing) · Proportional STAR — the multi-winner explainer.

Presentations & talks

  • Voting Methods 101 — "How changing our ballot can change everything" (2026, view-only deck) — a full methods-survey talk built for the Democratic Party of Oregon's voting-methods committee (lean disclosed: STAR-friendly, party-internal audience). Worth studying for two things this library values: it credits Choose-One's genuine strengths first (hand-countable, precinct-summable, audit-friendly — the batch-summability slide is a model of conceding the other side's best point), and it lists cons for every alternative including STAR (unfamiliar ballot; no public municipal election yet). Its Oregon reform timeline (Portland RCV + PR, Measure 117's 58–42 defeat, Eugene 2024, Oakridge 2024, Astoria's 2025 council use of STAR) is the most compact version of that story we link. Accuracy sources are real and cited with DOIs — Wolk et al. 2023 (claim-checked here) and McCune & McCune 2022. Read critically all the same: verify the "~24% of real ranked elections" attribution and the Eugene opposition-funding figures against primary sources before repeating them, and note the deck says "Trump would have lost" under a better method as a certainty — a counterfactual no method guarantees. Registered in LINKS.md as Voting Methods 101 (DPO).

Real-world adoption (STAR in actual use)

The current, authoritative "where is STAR used" list is maintained by the campaign — starvoting.org/elections (we link it rather than copy it, because adoption status changes and a stale list is worse than none). The honest summary as of writing: used by organizations and political parties (Multnomah County Democrats since 2019, several Oregon state parties); not yet adopted for a government election. A concrete example:

  • Multnomah County Democrats — "STAR Voting: What and Why" — a party organization explaining STAR (and Bloc STAR for multi-winner) because they use it for their own reorganization elections. Useful as a concrete "an organization actually adopted this, here's how they framed it to members" example, with a sample ballot.

Deep dives & data

Read them critically

Nearly everything above is made by people who advocate STAR (or another method). That doesn't make it wrong — but it's why this library exists: to let you check the claims against runnable elections. Pair the enthusiasm with:

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