This month’s voting was a test of the ranked_choice plugin where all voters pick 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices. The results are called instant run-off and the rounds are calculated to remove the lowest votes in each category. I don’t really like the way this one displays the results but I can assure you no one cheated.
I’m moving your comment into the discussion where where we’re trying to make the challenge better for everyone. Why not join the conversation and be part of the solution?
That’s like cheating, you can’t see the votes 
In what way is that cheating?
By mistake I moved the above comments into the thread out of order.
Doh! It’s been a long day.
I appreciate your comments, @Jonq.
@steve.improvthis your “Auntie Artica’s Polar Plunge” was also my second choice, after @Elixiah’s work (congrats @Elixiah! 
) . And my third was @edgarej’s poster WITH letters…
@sooz that would be so much better indeed! And only 2 votes like before… 
Having a third vote was really nice, anoucing the winner at the end was also nice, but the results for the poll are too confusing. Honestly I don’t get it.
Percentage is easy to understand, so I’m for it, but can we keep 3 votes ? By image that should mean more choice, so adding a vote to have 3 would keep the ratio.
I really don’t envy you - especially trying to implement changes like this. I hope you know all your efforts are appreciated though.
No I do not see any options to see who voted what 
I also voted for artic plunge. I also think the voting process was a bit tedious and confusing.
Also due to limitations of voting system on discourse we would be wrestling with it if we want to tweak it. It would be better if we took voting to a different third party website. We had tried that internally amongst the mod team earlier but the specific system we chose was not that good. perhaps anyone has any other voting site?
And I am also with sooz for keeping old voting system
In my eyes we should stay here with the voting process, in our ecosystem where we feel safe!
And yes, we should go back to our old voting system with only the pictures to vote for picture by picture, that seems the most transparent option to me.
Michelist
As a proposal, what would we all think of keeping the images separated as we did in the January poll (i.e. not clubbed together by artist) but reverting to the regular poll where the percentage of votes is displayed?
I am all for this. Whether we now get three or two choices, it won’t matter to me. As for @raghukamath suggestion for moving the vote to a third party, it sounds like a lot more work than what sooz is already doing… I wouldn’t go for it.
I’m afraid to do that as we’ll constantly have tied results. That’s due to the low number of members who cast votes.
We were able to increase it to 3 in the ranked_choice poll trial as that one is designed to eliminate most tie situations (but none of us liked it so don’t worry, I’m not suggesting we continue using that method).
I’ll be posting the new challenge tomorrow returning to our regular poll method and not the ranked_choice method, we’ll go back to 2 votes maximum and members can still enter up to 3 submissions.
We’ll vote on each submission individually instead of clubbing them together by artist. We know from experience that we’ll all be able to see the voting percentages on each.
Let’s see if that’s our “Goldilocks” position (meaning just right).
What he said! ^^^^^ ( @Michelist )
We learned quite a bit from our January experiment.
We liked voting on each image individually but we didn’t like the ranked_choice poll as it looked horribly complicated at voting time and we could only see which image won but no further info, like which one was second, third, etc… and that’s information we really like to see.
For February, we’re returning to the original poll type which reveals the percentage of votes received. We are going to vote on each image individually.
I just posted the new challenge with the rules updated and reformatted for easier reading.
Monthly Art Challenge – Alien World Building – February 2026
Gah. Mistake. It’s not big but I want to clear it up.
A mistake in my notes following the January ranked_choice experiment led to the February poll intro text saying we could make 2 choices but the poll itself said 3. It didn’t change the outcome of the art challenge but I regret confusing anyone who noticed it.
I thought we had decided to continue voting for 3 but I can’t find anything in this thread or moderator mail to back that up (only my comment saying I wasn’t a fan of that idea) so I’m going to say I hallucinated that idea like a bad AI chat bot.
Should we continue to make 3 selections?
I’m not against it. And since I know how often users have wanted more votes, I would say that it’s also a good idea.
Michelist