How groups actually decide where to go

Ranked-choice works. A group chat doesn't. Here is a real ballot, and what it got wrong.

jun 9, 20261 min readby Count Us In

Ask a group chat where it wants to go and you get four enthusiastic maybes, one link nobody opens, and silence. Not because people don't care, but because a chat gives them no way to say what they actually prefer without arguing for it.

That is what a ranked ballot fixes. Nobody has to campaign. Everyone states a preference in private, and the group gets an answer it can live with.

Most people would rather quietly overpay than start the money conversation.
cit bank / harris poll, 2024

The ballot still has to be readable

We watched a real group run a ranked-choice vote by Google Form. The mechanism was right and the ballot still failed, because the options were bare hotel names with no locations attached. A vote only works if the group can see what it is voting on.

The published version of this piece walks through that ballot and what a readable one looks like.