About

Two passport covers, one question: which one do you like more? Keep picking and Passport Ranker works out your favourite, while every vote also counts towards a world ranking.

Your ranking

Each vote updates an Elo score for both covers, so your most recent votes move the scores the most. Your ranking lists every cover you've ever voted on, by score, and it keeps all your votes when you switch to other passports or another pace.

Voting runs in rounds. When every passport in the running has played its matches for the round (one in Quick, two in Normal, three in Thorough), the lowest-scoring part of the pool drops out, so later rounds are spent deciding between your favourites. "Finish now" ends the rounds early. To start again from nothing, use "Forget my votes" at the bottom of your ranking.

The world ranking

All votes from all players are pooled and fitted with a single Bradley–Terry model, shown on the familiar Elo scale where 1500 is average. That way it doesn't matter which passports each player happened to see or how far they got. Covers with only a few votes are held close to 1500 until there's enough evidence. New votes show up within a few minutes.

You vs the world

For every vote you cast, the world ranking says how likely the world would have been to pick the same cover in that exact matchup. Covers you keep picking against those odds get a ▲ (you like them more than the world does); covers you keep turning down although the world likes them get a ▼. It takes about three clearly surprising votes before a cover gets a mark, and it only looks at the matchups you actually voted on, so it works however many passports you've seen.

Privacy

No account, no cookies, no ids. Your ranking stays in this browser's local storage. The server only receives the outcome of each vote (which two passports, who won) and adds it to running head-to-head totals, plus a counter that goes up once for each new browser. When you share your ranking, the link itself carries it, so it isn't stored anywhere else either.

The covers

Current ordinary passport covers, one per country, mostly from the galleries in Wikipedia's List of passports, with a few swapped for sharper versions of the same design. Each link below goes to the image's source page, with its full authorship and licence details.