The pineapple progression — Choose-One's winner shrinks, the real choice doesn't¶
A silly, runnable illustration of one serious point: under Choose-One, the more candidates on the ballot, the smaller the winner's mandate can get — while a method that reads the whole ballot keeps finding the choice everyone's actually happy with. We grow a pizza menu from 3 toppings to 11 and watch a fan-favorite win on a shrinking sliver of the vote.
▶ Live on BetterVoting — every rung is a real, clickable election: 34% ↗ · 25% ↗ · 11% ↗ (each shows all four counts).
The setup never changes: a group shares one pizza. Everybody has a passionate favorite topping — but plain Cheese is nobody's first choice and everybody's easy second: put it on, and no one complains. Only the length of the menu changes.
Watch it shrink¶
| Menu | Choose-One winner | on… | STAR / Ranked Robin / Approval | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 toppings (page · run) | 🍍 Pineapple | 34% | 🧀 Cheese | live ↗ |
| 4 toppings (page · run) | 🍍 Pineapple | 25% | 🧀 Cheese | live ↗ |
| 11 toppings (page · run) | 🍍 Pineapple | 11% | 🧀 Cheese | live ↗ |
At the bottom rung, eleven diners out of a hundred decide the whole pizza — and the other 89 wanted something else. Pineapple's fan club never grew; the menu did. Choose-One only ever counts your one favorite, so the more the field splits, the less it takes to "win."
Meanwhile nothing changes for the whole-ballot methods. Cheese is everybody's easy second at every rung, so:
- STAR — Cheese runs away with the scoring round and wins the runoff. → Cheese, every time.
- Ranked Robin — Cheese beats every topping head-to-head (the Condorcet winner). → Cheese, every time.
- Approval — nearly everyone approves Cheese; the niche toppings each get only their fan club. → Cheese, every time.
The point (it isn't really about pizza)¶
Choose-One asks only for your favorite, so a passionate minority can win — and the bigger the field, the smaller that minority needs to be. A ballot that lets you say more, counted in full, keeps electing the candidate a majority is genuinely glad about, no matter how crowded the race.
11% is the extreme that makes it obvious; 34% is the everyday, believable version — the canonical minority-winner example, where a candidate wins a real election on a third of the vote. Same lesson, one memorable pizza.
Run any rung: the .yaml files above. The clean 34% teaching case: the minority winner. Every method on one electorate: same opinions, every method. The concept: Choose-One / Plurality.