Majority vote

Decisions a show of hands gets wrong

A show of hands is quick and it is right most of the time. Where it goes wrong is any question where people can see what everybody else thinks before they decide. The first three hands set the answer, the quiet half of the room follows them, and whoever asked comes away believing in a consensus that was manufactured in about four seconds.

Passing one device round fixes that for the price of a minute. Nobody sees a vote but their own, the totals arrive all at once at the end, and the room finds out what it actually thought rather than what the loudest person thought first. It is the same trick a paper ballot plays, without the paper.

Class decisions and team retros without a survey tool

The obvious uses are the small ones. Which trip, which book, which of the three ideas on the board. A retro question nobody will answer honestly with a manager in the room. A committee that needs a straw poll before it spends twenty minutes arguing. For all of these the friction of a survey tool, the account, the link, the waiting, costs more than the decision is worth.

The one-at-a-time reveal is worth turning on for anything with an audience. Showing every bar at once tells the room the answer; uncovering them one by one makes the room watch, and the last one lands properly. If you want a vote for a person rather than an option, the ballot box does that with the roster as the candidates. For a fast public count instead of a private one, the would you rather counter takes two numbers and draws the same bar.

Why the results stay on your device

There is no share link on this page, and that is deliberate rather than missing. Everything here is something you typed: the question, the options, the names, the result. A link that carried any of it would put the question your team answered honestly into a URL, into a browser history and into whatever the link was pasted in. So none of it travels.

What is kept is the smallest thing that is useful: the question and the option that won, for the last twenty. It lives in this browser, it is never uploaded, and there is a button to clear it. If you need a record that outlives the browser, take a photograph of the bars, which is also the version everybody in the room can see.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.vote.history, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.