We had great voter turnout at the Stars and Stripes event with 82 people of all ages voting. The winner is Chocolate Cake!
Here are the Election results (with graphs) of all the rounds of our Ranked Choice Voting Activity at the Stars and Stripes Festival in Lyndonville on July 20, 2019. The candidates for the birthday cake for the United States at the Stars and Stripes Festival were Apple Pie, Chocolate Cake, Strawberry Shortcake, and Vanilla Cake.
Ranked Choice Voting requires a majority for the candidate to win. Since we had 82 votes, that means 41 + 1, or 42 votes. If a candidate gets the majority of votes on the first round, you are done! You have a winner!
But if you don't have a majority, you look to see which candidates have the most votes. They are still in the running. But the candidates with the fewest votes can't win, so you look at the second choice votes of the people who voted for them.
On the first round of counting the ballots, Chocolate Cake was the leader with 28 votes. Apple Pie came in second with 24 votes. Strawberry Shortcake followed with 18 votes, and Vanilla Cake came in last with 12 votes. No one had at least 42 votes.
Since no candidate had a majority, we looked to see who had the lowest number of votes. That was Vanilla Cake, with only 12 votes. Luckily, in this system, the people who voted for Vanilla Cake still got to have their voice heard. They were able to express their first choice (Vanilla Cake), and even though their first choice didn't win, they still got to have a candidate of their choice in the running because their second choice counted.
In the second round of counting the votes, all the first-place votes for Chocolate Cake, Apple Pie, and Strawberry Shortcake were counted again, but now we added in the additional votes from Vanilla Cake voters' second choices.
In this round, Chocolate Cake had 28 + 9 = 37 votes; Apple Pie had 24 + 1 = 25 votes, and Strawberry Shortcake had 18 + 2 = 20 votes. Still, no candidate had a majority of 42 votes! We needed to go for one more round of counting the next choice of voters for the candidate with the least votes, Strawberry Shortcake in this case. For some of those voters, Strawberry Shortcake was their first choice, Vanilla Cake was their second choice, and we have to look at their third choice. For others, Strawberry Shortcake was already their second choice, so we are looking at their third choice. For others, we are just looking at their second choice.
So now we were down to two candidates, Chocolate Cake and Apple Pie. One of them would definitely win a majority, unless there was a tie. In this final round, Apple Pie had 33 votes and Chocolate Cake won with 49 votes.
In this election, clearly we had a lot of Chocolate Cake lovers, but people who preferred other desserts still got to have their vote count even though Chocolate Cake wasn't their first choice.
Chocolate Cake is the Winner!
Second: Apple Pie. Third: Strawberry Shortcake. Fourth: Vanilla Cake.
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