Introducing Trash Gordon and Vin No Diesel, Wisconsin’s First Electric Trash Trucks

The vote to name Madison’s and Wisconsin’s first electric collection vehicles ended on October 21 and we have the results.

Voters selected Trash Gordon and Vin No Diesel.  Welcome to the fleet!

How the Voting Worked

This election was a ranked choice election hosted by Wisconsin Clean Cities.

In the election, people who participated could rank up to five candidates from the list of 12 possible names for each truck.

You can see the round-by-round results for each truck here.

We also link to the results from our webpage about the electric collection vehicles.

Brief Ranked Choice Voting Explanation

Ranked choice looks to reveal a candidate that receives the most overall preference.  It achieves this through a series of elimination rounds.

In the first round, there is a check to see if any candidate received over 50% of the first-choice votes. If no candidate gets over 50% of the first-choice votes, then the candidate that received the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated.

The votes for the eliminated candidate are then redistributed to the second choice on those ballots.

This process repeats itself until one candidate has received a majority, which is over 50% of the total number of votes, or until it’s down to just two candidates and then one candidate with the most votes in that final round is declared the winner. 

You can find other explanations about how ranked choice voting works online, like this Minnesota Public Rado News video, or this one from the State of Alaska Division of Elections.

How did Vin No Diesel and Trash Gordon win?

Neither Trash Gordon nor Vin No Diesel received over 50% of the votes in their elections.  And both truck name votes went down to the final elimination round to determine the winner.

As you can see in the results, they appeared on the greatest number of ballots by the election’s end, making them the winner. 

After the first round both Trash Gordon and Vin No Diesel were in third place.  However, they continued to gather support when lower-performing candidates votes were moved to their other choices. Eventually, it was revealed through the elimination rounds that more voters preferred these two choices over the other options even if they were not most people’s first choice.

Additional Information

More information about all of the Streets Division services, including the electric trucks, can be found on the newly revamped Streets Division’s website, www.cityofmadison.com/Streets.