Requesting Feedback: Case Study for the 2026 Steering Council Election

[ArendPeter (Arend Peter Castelein)]

Hi all,

I lead the development of BetterVoting.com , which was used to run the previous Steering Council election with Bloc STAR.

I’m so happy the community chose to use STAR Voting, and I’ve been working on a case study so the election can highlight in Case Studies - STAR Voting . Case studies aim to give a short overview of the election and the organization so that it can be an easy reference for future organizations considering STAR Voting.

I’ve written a first draft at Python Election Case Study - Google Docs , and I plan to post it in the next few weeks, but I wanted to give the community a chance to feedback to make sure I didn’t represent anything. Any comments would be much appreciated .

Edit: Hopefully this the right place for me to post this, I didn’t see a good fit in the forum topics

[Lucas_Malor]

There aree a lot of interesting threads about STAR voting on this forum:

Google Search

Honestly, as a simple user, I’m not involved in it. I just realized such a system exists since it was adopted in SC elections. I’m not a expert. I asked Gemini a little about it, and they said me that it discourage the bullet vote and extremists. I think the fact it’s better to vote your favorite candidate and at least another not-so-bad candidate is interesting. About the fact it will tend to avoid extremism… I don’t have a strong opinion about that.

The only post I found really interesting was a post about an implementation of a robust auto-ballot in Python and JS:

Impressive but spooky AI

Indeed, the more I use one, the more I value it. Over the last week, I wrote code to try a new way of doing “fair” pseudo-random tiebreaking for election scoring software. The collaboration with ChatGPT-5 was remarkable! One goal was that exactly the same results had to be reproducible in a JavaScript implementation, a language I know little about, full of odd (to my eyes) quirks. For example, ints are limited to 53 bits of precision - except when doing bitwise operations, in which contexts …

I think that anyway the person that it’s more expert in this field and in STAR vote is Tim Peters.

[willingc (Carol Willing)]

Thanks for putting this together @ArendPeter and your assistance during the last election.

Perhaps core development would be a better category for this post.

[ArendPeter (Arend Peter Castelein)]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I’ve approved all changes on the doc, and the case study is now posted at Case Studies - STAR Voting