Voting 101 — the basics (the ballot, the two rounds, the spoiler)¶
First contact, no background needed. The goal is intuition, not theory — you should be able to feel why STAR before you can define anything. Every step links a real election you can run.
Companion: read this beside STAR — start here — that page tells the story; this page is the map with the runnable files. · Up: Curriculum hub · Next level: Voting 201.
101.0 — The problem, before any method¶
What clicks: the way we vote now (mark one) can pick the option most people didn't want. That's vote-splitting, and its political name is the spoiler effect.
See it: the team-lunch story in STAR — start here — five friends, and "pick one" buries the option everyone was happy with. Background: Choose-One / plurality.
Key terms: Choose-One / plurality, vote-splitting, spoiler effect, "lesser evil."
101.1 — The two rounds, on one election¶
What clicks: STAR asks you to score every option 0–5 (like a Yelp review); then the two highest-scored have an automatic runoff. Score → Then → Automatic → Runoff.
See it (the running example): The team lunch vote — the two rounds turn once, with real BetterVoting results. The one-ballot-through-both-rounds diagram lives in start here.
Key terms: score 0–5, Scoring Round, finalists, Automatic Runoff, Equal Support.
101.2 — Add a third option: the winner becomes the compromise¶
What clicks: with three or more candidates, reading the whole ballot lets the broadly-liked option surface instead of being split away.
See it: three candidates, one ballot · two ballots. The classic at scale: Tennessee capital.
The point: adding a candidate you love never splits your vote.
A name for the compromise: the candidate who would beat each rival one-on-one is the Condorcet winner — "the majority's head-to-head choice." At 101 that's the whole idea; usually one exists and every good method (STAR, Ranked Robin) picks it. What happens when no such candidate exists is a 201/301 story.
101.3 — How you're allowed to vote¶
What clicks: there's no "wrong" way to fill it in — give your favorite 5, your worst 0 (or blank), and everyone else where they honestly land. Equal scores are allowed.
See it: the STAR ballot & voting styles — the ballot itself, then thirteen legal ways to fill it out, each with a picture and a page of its own. This is the 101 destination for this rung: the lesson here is what a ballot may say, not who won.
Run it: the same styles as tabulatable elections — the eight-style gallery (bullet vote, backup, "anyone but…", protest — all valid) · five more (approval-style, partial, compressed, null) · a bullet vote · low-score ballots.
Ballot note: "equal scores = no preference" means no preference in the runoff — those ballots still count fully in the scoring round (Equal Support).
101.4 — The headline lesson: top scorer ≠ winner¶
What clicks: leading the scoring round only makes you a finalist; the winner is whichever finalist more voters prefer. Sometimes those differ — and that's the safeguard working, not a bug.
See it: the runoff overturns the score leader · the live case BV2182 — FAQ runoff reversal · the full progression, Runoff Reversal. Concept: the Automatic Runoff.
101.5 — The payoff: the spoiler, in numbers¶
What clicks: the whole case, in one race — a similar candidate enters and STAR doesn't break.
See it: the vote-splitting scenarios (spoiler → bloc-leader → outsider) · cross-method on the same ballots: the split-voting set.
101.6 — One idea that unlocks everything later¶
What clicks: a ballot is what you mark; a tabulation is how it's counted. The same ranked ballot can be counted several ways (IRV, Ranked Robin, STV) — so "RCV" names a ballot, not a method.
Material: a ballot and a count · terminology basics. Why here: it unlocks 201's precise comparisons.
Up: Curriculum hub · Start Here · Next: Voting 201 — reading results & comparisons.
(Aside: the deliberately-trivial two-candidate demos — where STAR just equals ordinary voting — are parked in silly_two_cand_STAR; they're kept for completeness, not part of the learning path.)