As the Music Director of the Virginia Gentlemen, I am tasked with producing the setlist for the semester. When elected, I decided to take a democratic approach for song selection. Each member got to add 2 songs to the playlist, of which we voted on in order to determine the setlist. I was hoping to get at least 4 songs picked by this method. However, I did not specify how I would be counting votes, allowing for flexibility on my end.
The members, or rather voters in this poll were told to rank their top 5 songs. My original plan was to assign points to each song based on these preferences, 5 being the highest ranking song for an individual, and 1 being the lowest, a system which I now know is referred to as the Borda Count (in this case with multiple winners). Punching all of this into an excel sheet, there were four clear songs to be chosen based on the high amount of points received. However, I did not like one of the songs that was voted through. So, using the flexibility of not revealing how votes were to be tallied, I switched the voting system to a multiple-member plurality. This way, the four songs that received the most votes were voted through. I was much happier with this setlist, and given the small number of voters in this system, I think a plurality was the correct method to use. Due to the small population size of the Virginia Gentlemen, the distribution of music preferences tends to stray from normality. By using a plurality system in determining the setlist, I appealed to the largest amount of the population. It was interesting to see how employing a different voting system resulted in a substantially different outcome. It is interesting to think that for large scale elections, the method used really has an impact on the overall result, just as it did in the small population of an acapella group.
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