Hot take: The way we voted on our last book pick was totally rigged

I overheard my friend Sarah say she googled each book's reading level before voting and only picked the easiest one. That got me thinking about how our book club does votes. We use a simple majority system but people vote based on all kinds of weird reasons like page count or cover color. Last month we had 12 people and 6 books nominated. The winner got 4 votes but 3 of those were from people who admitted they just wanted a quick read. It felt kind of hollow when we started discussing it and half the group hated it. Has anyone else dealt with people gaming the vote or picking books for the wrong reasons? How do you handle nominations in your club?

2 comments

2 Comments

anna_carter533d ago

oh man your friend sarah googling reading levels is such a classic power move haha. my old book club had the same issue, people would vote for whatever was shortest or had the prettiest cover. what finally worked for us was switching to a ranked choice vote where you list your top 3 picks and we tally points. it totally stopped the "i just want a quick read" crowd because they had to think about what they actually wanted second and third. we also made a rule that the person who nominated the book has to give a 2 minute pitch before voting, just saying why they picked it. that cut down on the random nominations for sure. last thing we did was rotate the person who counts the votes each month so no one can claim it's rigged. it's not perfect but way better than the old system where we'd end up with books nobody cared about.

jason3283d ago

One thing nobody's brought up yet @anna_carter53 is that you gotta check if the book is actually available at the library or cheap to find. We had people nominate stuff that was out of print or cost 30 bucks and it just killed the whole month. Ranked voting won't help if nobody can even get their hands on the book in the first place.