The vote you can't see

A group was asked to rank four resorts, from a list of hotel names that didn't say what country they were in. That ballot is why this app exists.

jun 24, 20261 min readby Count Us In

A while back, a group planning a milestone trip together got the email every group trip starts with: here are the options, go rank your favorites. Four resorts, a link to a voting form, democracy in action.

One problem. The options were hotel names. Just hotel names. Two of them happened to carry a recognizable place. The other two did not. Unless you already knew the geography, nothing in the name told you what country you would be flying to.

from the original email · august 2024

Please rank these in order of preference:

  1. The Grand Palladium
  2. Secrets Cap Cana
  3. Sandals Royal Curaçao
  4. Hyatt Ziva

DUE FRIDAY.

Four resorts. Three countries. The email never says which is which.

So a dozen-plus people were being asked to vote on where to spend a week and real money, from a list they could not actually read. Everyone either did their own private Googling to reconstruct what the organizer already knew, or voted blind.

One person could see the whole trip. The rest of us were looking at a list of hotel names.
the founding observation

Here is the part that matters: the organizer did nothing wrong. The organizer had been researching those resorts for weeks. From inside that research, the location was obviously in the name. The organizer could not see that knowledge as knowledge, and had no way to tell that the group could not see it either. No amount of being more careful fixes that, because the gap is invisible from the organizer's side.

The tool has to close it. That ballot is why this app exists: a group should be able to see what it is deciding, and see itself deciding it.