The results start to pick apart this puzzle.

Sea Urchin turns out to be quite the extremist! A great deal of people placed Sea Urchin at the top of their list, but a great deal also placed it at the bottom! In fact, even more people ranked Sea Urchin in last place than first.

And yet Sea Urchin won our first vote.

It turns out that this voting system — simply tallying everyone's first choice — is just about one of the worst. It's technical name is Plurality Voting and it doesn't have a great reputation. It can often allow extremist candidates, who even a majority of people may dislike, to win elections. The system prefers candidates with a few strong supporters over candidates that are well liked by many.

A Different Voting System

As it turns out, the voting system you use greatly determines the outcome of the vote. Your choice of one system or another is a choice to favor certain types of candidates over others.

But voting systems aren't fixed in stone — what happens if we tweak it a bit? To do this we'll need to simplify our dataset. Let's create a dataset with only 4 sushi options. See if you can recreate the situation we saw above! Sea Urchin should win, even though more people rank it in last place. Click here to show a solution.