3. Intro
The following memo and analysis will give insight into the demographics of the individuals that participated in the
recent RCV poll. My objectives for this memo were to analyze the identities of people (age and party affiliation),
and how they respond to ranked choice voting after participating in an election utilizing ranked choice voting.
The variables looked at in this memo include:
● Age Brackets
● Party Affiliations
● The Importance of Majority Winning
● Difficulty of Ranking
● Support of RCV
4. Age Analysis
The majority of the poll participants (57.26%) seem to be around
the ages of 50-65+; however, there appears to be an equal
representation amongst all age brackets 18 and over.
Age Bracket
Sum of Participants in
Age Bracket
Percentage of
Participants in Age
Bracket
18-34 181.630 18.03%
35-49 248.881 24.71%
50-64 299.273 29.71%
65+ 277.445 27.55%
A summary of the ages of all participants reveals that the
youngest participant(s) was 18 years old and the oldest
participant(s) was 98 years old. The mean of all of the ages
given also matches with the information discovered from
the table.
age
count 1079.000000
mean 55.937905
std 18.753178
min 18.000000
25% 40.000000
50% 60.000000
75% 71.000000
max 98.000000
Age Summary
Participant Age
Brackets
5. Party Affiliation and Majority Importance
The majority of poll participants also
identified as Democrat; however, the majority
isn't a large one, and every group (besides
those who did not identify with any party)
was represented almost equally.
Party Affiliation Sum of Participants
Not Sure 18.351
Independent 303.613
Democrat 377.043
Republican 304.228
From the table below, we can see that an overwhelming
majority believed that winning with a majority is very
important. This bit of information lets us know that a majority
of people are interested in a process that lets the true
majority winner win the entire election.
How important is winning a
majority? Sum of Participant Votes
1:Very Important 601.699
2. Somewhat Important 157.500
3. Somewhat Unimportant 61.819
4. Very Unimportant 121.032
5. Not Sure 65.179
Participant Party Affiliations
Importance of Majority Winning
6. Opinions on RCV
How easy is ranking? Sun of Participants
Percentage of
Participants
Hard 71.385 7.37%
Easy 233.931 24.1%
Not Sure 54.105 5.58%
Very Easy 540.461 55.79%
Very Hard 68.871 7.11%
Do you want to use
RCV more? Sum of Participants
Percentage of
Participants
1.Use Ranked Choice
For More Elections 358.813 35.62%
2.Use Only For What
it’s Used For Now 114.837 11.40%
3.Don’t Use Ranked
Choice For Any
Elections 463.059 45.97%
4.Not Sure 70.512 7.00%
An interesting bit of information I found is how easy participants found RCV to be; however, an alarming majority of
participants voted not to use RCV for any elections.
Highlighted in yellow are the choices that the majority of participants chose to express their opinions. Highlighted in green is
what I believe is also important to note. There’s still a large amount of voters that would like to use RCV more. If we add the
percentage of people that support any usage of RCV versus no usage at all, the percentage that voted for RCV is actually
higher. The opinion of whether or not to utilize RCV to any capacity is almost 50/50 (45.97% oppose and 47.02% support)
How Easy is Ranking
Do You Want to Use RCV More?
7. Political Ideology
Analysis
With this graph, we can see how
strongly each political ideology supports
or opposes RCV. We can see that a large
majority of participants identified as
moderate and that a large majority of
those participants do support RCV.
Conservative participants largely
oppose RCV. In fact, it appears, based
on this graph, that the more
conservative a participant was, the
more likely they were to oppose RCV,
while the more liberal a participant was,
the more likely they were to support
RCV.
9. Future Processes and Analysis
With more time, and the proper resources, I think that a very important topic to look into next is the
relationships between certain variables. The graph on “Political Ideology and RCV Support” shown on a
previous slide briefly covers this, but an investigation into the nature of the relationships would be needed
to prove definitive correlations and the strength of these relationships. I also think it would be helpful to
narrow down the identities of participants more by looking into education and income, since these things
also play a big role in political identity and ideology.
Based on my analysis of the data, the poll participants were a majority moderate in their ideology and
comfortable with the concept of RCV, but were split on whether or not to utilize it for future elections.
Future efforts could be put in trying to sway a more conservative crowd into the idea of utilizing RCV in
more elections, since the majority of more moderate and liberal crowds are already open to the idea.
