Nice job, people!
auntiehill
John Clark (Casey’s most recent disguise, as the shaggy waiter guy, was the best yet!
)
Chris3123
Uncover the Big List of Past Contests!
I do not understand how voting for 1 instead of 3 would reduce the number of ties.
It wouldn't, it would
increase the odds of a tie. Let's say you have two votes to distribute between two options. You could vote 1 and 1 or 2 and 0. 50/50 chance of a tie.
Let's say you have 120 million votes for those two options. That's a Presidential election. I dunno what the odds are of them getting exactly 60 million votes apiece, but it's a lot smaller than 50/50. If McCain and Obama had
tied the popular vote, I think everyone would have fallen over dead.
However, the odds of an Electoral College tie, with only 538 votes to distribute, are considerably higher than the odds for a popular vote. Certainly within the realm of possibility.
Thus proving that the more votes you have to distribute between whatever number of options you have, the lower the odds of a tie.
To lessen the chance of ties in the contest, we need to
increase options:
-number of votes each person is given
-number of entries per contest
-number of people who vote
Those second two are outside the control of the contest rules so the first one is what we should focus on. Give everyone five votes, for instance, and we'd have fewer ties. Or ten. The limiting factor there is simply that gets silly to let people vote for ten options out of 15 or so.
That is, if ties bother people. Don't bother me. When there's a tie, let the person who won most recently off the hook and have the other guy set up the next contest. That distributes the workload around.
