Bernie Sanders would likely have been elected president in 2016 with ranked choice voting

My day job has impeded my progress, but, in honor of the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration as our president, I am releasing the first results from on my ranking voting polling and simulations.

I want to emphasize that this study is not trying to question the actual outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. It is only trying to answer the following questions:

• “What would have happened in 2016 if ranked voting was used?”, and
• “Should the United States use ranked voting in the future?”

Based on a May 2017 nationwide SurveyMonkey survey of almost 1300 respondents, and many tens of thousands of voting simulations, I’ve concluded that Bernie would likely have been elected president in 2016 if we had used instant run-off elections to choose the electors in the electoral college.

Below is a set of 15 slides describing this work. Still to come  will be:

• Analysis of alternate ranked voting methods (e.g. “Schultze”), which also predict high probability wins for Sanders
• More detailed description of uncertainty analysis and “convergence” of numerical simulations
• More detailed analysis of poll results
• Public release of polling and simulation data