Ranked Voting Tools

Aside from redistricting, my other favorite issue around election reform is getting beyond 'pick one' ballots to rankings or ratings voting. It's what elections should be. We can start right away using it at every level to make better decisions. Picking an office outing? Officer of your club? Here are some tools:

https://bolson.org/cgi-bin/election_maker
Paper ballots. This makes ranked ballots you can print and fill out on paper; also a tabulation sheet for counting with Condorcet’s method. (Instructional video is planned.)

http://betterpolls.com/do/v8uIlar1ufph
Online votes. I linked to an silly example voting between four flavors of ice cream. But make any poll you like there. Requires fb or google log in to create a poll or vote. Doesn’t spam anyone, just make a link and send the link to people you want to vote.

Towards Redistricting Reform in Oregon

I'm working with some people in Oregon to start working towards a ballot initiative to change the state constitution to use fully automated impartial redistricting. If you know anyone active in Oregon politics, please share this with them. Proposed ballot initiative for redistricting reform in Oregon, as of 2016-11-11

Fixed Alaska

For years my software broke when trying to deal with Alaska because its longitudes straddle the -180/180 split. My simplistic cartesian software couldn't handle this. Also it was probably horribly warped by using a naive mercator style projection. But no more! Now I use the proj4 geographic projection library to optionally warp a state to an azimuthal equal area projection centered over the state so that there is relatively little distortion anywhere within it. This also normalizes the coordinates to all fit in a simple x,y bounding box. So, I now have 20 districts for the Alaska state Senate and 40 districts for the state House and they look pretty good: http://bdistricting.com/2010/AK_Senate/ http://bdistricting.com/2010/AK_House/