Tool for conducting roller coaster polls inspired by Mitch Hawker's "Best Roller Coaster Poll". Ballots rank certain coasters, and pairwise matchups of coasters are assigned a "Win", "Loss", or "Tie" depending on their ranking. Once all ballots and W-L-T's are tallied up, roller coasters are ranked by order of win percentage. The method is not dissimilar to how a ranked pairs election is conducted.

To run an election where:

• The minimum number of a riders a coaster needs in order to be ranked is 10
• The default ballot is named generic ballot.txt
• The folder containing submitted ballots is named ballots
• The resulting output file should be named Coaster Poll 20XX

Simply run:

python tabulator.py -m 10 -b "generic ballot.txt" -f ballots -o "Coaster Poll 20XX"

And output will be saved to Coaster Poll 20XX.xlsx

Alternatively, the command line argument defaults are:

• -m 9
• -b blankballot2019.txt
• -f ballots2019
• -o "Poll Results.xlsx"

Additional command line flags include:

• -c sets fill color of certain cells to reflect the make (manufacturer) of the coaster
• -d wood/steel specifies what set of designers to reference (default: wood)
• -i includes sensitive voter data in a spreadsheet in the output file; -ii includes more
• -r bothers rcdb.com with requests to fill in coaster details
• -v prints data as it's processed; -vv prints even more

The script requires with Python 3 and openpyxl.

Scraping data from rcdb.com with the -r flag requires lxml and beautifulsoup4.

Poll designed and hosted by ElloCoaster. Check out our Wood Coaster Poll!