A method of surveying a population of voters concerning a pool of contestants to obtain a consensus comprises generating a digital list of all possible pairs, triplets or quadruplets of contestants in the pool and/or sublist of such small subsets of contestants in a subpool such as a social network, presenting to voters in the population at a web site each small subset of contestants in the digital list and/or digital sublist, and for each small subset of contestants presented prompting the voter to select a preferred contestant among the contestants that appear in the small subset of contestants. The voters may also be contestants. A tally of preferred contestants among all voters is assembled as is a tally among contestants from the subpool, and contestants may be ranked. The voting may be applied to costume contests, pet contests, political elections, market surveys and other data collection methods.