2.2: Preference Schedules
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To begin, we’re going to want more information than a traditional ballot normally provides. A traditional ballot usually asks you to pick your favorite from a list of choices. This ballot fails to provide any information on how a voter would rank the alternatives if their first choice was unsuccessful.
A preference ballot is a ballot in which the voter ranks the choices in order of preference.
A vacation club is trying to decide which destination to visit this year: Hawaii (H), Orlando (O), or Anaheim (A). Their votes are shown below:
Bob Ann Marv Alice Eve Omar Lupe Dave Tish Jim 1st choice AAOHAOHOHA2nd choice OHHAHHAHAH3rd choice HOAOOAOAOO
Solution
These individual ballots are typically combined into one preference schedule, which shows the number of voters in the top row that voted for each option:
13331st choice AAOH2nd choice OHHA3rd choice HOAO
Notice that by totaling the vote counts across the top of the preference schedule we can recover the total number of votes cast: 1+3+3+3=10 total votes.