I ran a Borda-style ranked poll bot for Telegram friend groups for 9 months — here's what ordinary people actually did with a non-FPTP option
Telegram's built-in polls are plurality voting: pick one option, most votes wins. My board game group used them before every meetup to pick games, and at that scale plurality fails in a very visible way: with unit-weight votes over 4–6 options we got constant ties and one-vote margins, and settling those meant running another poll round. The information that would have settled it — everyone's second and third choices — just doesn't exist in a plurality ballot.
So I built a bot where everyone ranks all the options and points are awarded by position. A side effect I didn't fully appreciate beforehand: positional scores made ties essentially extinct — totals land like 424 vs 388, not 3 vs 3 — and one poll yields a full ranked top-N, so runoff rounds disappeared entirely.
I gave it three point schedules:
| Rank | Balanced (default) | Priority | Consensus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 2nd | 80 | 70 | 90 |
| 3rd | 64 | 49 | 80 |
| 4th | 52 | 35 | 70 |
Balanced and Priority are geometric (×0.8 and ×0.7 per rank). Consensus is linearly decreasing — which, I realized later, makes it exactly Borda count. Steeper decay behaves closer to plurality (first choices dominate); flatter, closer to Borda (broad acceptability wins).
Real usage after 9 months: 158 users, 72 polls, mostly small friend-group decisions (games, dinner, movies). The finding that surprised me most: ~86% of polls used the default schedule. The other two sit one tap away behind an "alternative options" button, and almost nobody opened it. Consensus — arguably the right method for "find what the group prefers overall" — was chosen 7 times out of 72. Defaults completely dominate method choice, even when the entire product is about voting methods.
Design decisions I'd like this sub's opinion on:
- Ballots force a complete strict ranking of all options. No ties, no truncation. With 6+ options, does forcing people to rank choices they don't actually care about add noise that matters — or is it harmless at dinner-table scale?
- Is geometric decay a defensible positional rule, or should plain Borda be the default?
- At friend-group scale (everyone knows everyone, and ballots can be non-anonymous), how much does Borda's famous burial vulnerability (ranking your favorite's main rival last on purpose) actually matter in practice?
Screenshots and a longer writeup: https://286bit.com/w8pollbot?src=endfptp — but I'm mostly here for the methods argument.