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SELECT * 
FROM my_table
ORDER BY RAND()

RAND() returns a random floating-point value but functions to randomly order the selection of rows in the above usage.

If you combine the query with LIMIT, you will end up with a random selection of rows from your table.

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SELECT * 
FROM my_table
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 3

Assuming you have more than 3 rows in your table, you will always get 3 random rows from the query.

Here is the MySQL query that would do just the job.

SELECT person,
SUM(IF(vote = "yes", 1,0)) AS `yes_votes`,
SUM(IF(vote = "no", 1,0)) AS `no_votes`,
COUNT(vote) AS `total`
FROM votes
GROUP BY person
ORDER BY yes_votes DESC


The following would be the result of the query:

The beauty of the query all lies in the SUM IF statements. For example, in order to count the yes votes, the IF statement will check to see if vote = “yes” as it loops through all the rows. If so, the yes_votes column alias is incremented by 1. The same procedure goes for counting the no votes. The COUNT statements keeps a tally on the total number of votes. The GROUP BY person statement allows the vote counters to calculate the numbers by person instead of the total number of yes and no votes.

Now, you do not have to loop through your MySQL results to count column values =)