Ranked Choice poll doesn't use min/max settings properly

[v-maxbraden (Max B)]

When I create a multiple choice polls I can can set the minimum and maximum number of choices before Vote is enabled, but this doesn’t seem to work for Ranked Choice voting.

If I create a poll with five options:
poll type=ranked_choice results=always min=1 max=3 public=false chartType=bar

The max=3 parameter seems to be ineffective; a user can still rank four or all options.
The min=1 parameter only works if it’s a 1. If I set it to 2 or more, the poll undoes itself and is just a bullet list.

Maybe this is by design or is an issue particular to the way ranked choice works?
We have a use case where we want users to rank a minimum number of the poll options, and ranked choice is preferable to multiple choice.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

It feels to me related to ranked_choice implementation, maybe @merefield has some ideas here?

I am sure we can sort something out here.

[merefield (Robert)]

Yeah, this isn’t currently supported, but I would definitely not call that a bug.

Perhaps the markdown interface is too permissive and that’s misleading and you might well argue that’s a minor bug. But it shouldn’t be a surprise to people who know instant run-off that this isn’t part of the algorithm.

It’s not really a standard feature of Ranked Choice, Instant Run-off Voting, where the voter has the discretion to select the number of candidates they wish to rank, and can abstain on the others.

Imagine restricting someone on a ballot paper. I guess someone could call your paper spoiled if you rank 4 out of 5 candidates and somewhere on the instructions you were told you could have only 3, but suspect that’s not usual as it would cause confusion and a lot of spoiled ballots which might upset the electorate.

But of course Discourse doesn’t run on paper

And sure you could definitely add that feature! - it could make sense to limit things to 2 or 3 choices out of 5.

See:

Instant-runoff voting

Creating and managing polls

Fair point @meave Author of Ranked Choice polls here, that is a dropped ball. I do not have edit rights to the OP. Very happy for someone to copy this and format as they see fit, or if converted to a Wiki, happy to contribute: Currently works exactly as described here, it’s classic Instant Run-off Voting: (my fork of the poll plugin actually contains that example as a unit test!) Process is as follows: Every voter submits an ordered list of candidates. In each round we only consider t…

[merefield (Robert)]

To follow up I had a re-look at the build dialogue to refresh my memory.

As you can see there is no misleading setting for Ranked Choice on the form. So the bug is not here. I respect it remains visible on the markdown shell for Polls and that could lead you to believe it might have an effect.

I think this is fairer as a Contribute > Feature request. Moving it there.

I’d be happy to work on it if hired to do so (I’m not a member of the Discourse team and as a freelancer not paid a salary, time is money … ), consider posting in Marketplace or PMing me direct for a quote if this is important to you. I’d be very happy to PR if acceptable.