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What Is... Ranked Choice Voting?

What is ranked choice voting?

Ranked choice voting is a voting system where each voter ranks candidates from most preferable to least preferable. It aims to eliminate "wasted votes."

One way to carry this out is to tally up the results and assign 5 points to 1st, 4 points to 2nd, 3 points to 3rd, etc. and add up each candidate's points. However, there is a better way.

How Did We Come To This Solution?

First of all, let's imagine a situation where there are five candidates. Each candidate is at a certain point on a spectrum for a certain issue (horizontal axis). However, each candidate has an independent view on another issue (vertical axis).

First Past the Post

In this scenario, candidates A and E are either part of the most popular parties or on opposite ends of the most group-forming issue. In a normal first past the post voting system, only candidates A and E have a chance at winning. This is because for each individual, it is a complete waste to vote for B, C, or D since they have a very low chance of getting enough votes to win.

Elimination Elections

One solution to this problem would be to hold multiple elections. In the first election, everyone votes for their top candidate. Then, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then, a second election is held. Everyone votes for their top candidate among those remaining and again, the candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated. This would continue until only one candidate remains.

Ranked Choice

There are problems with the above system. The biggest one is that every citizen has to vote in 5 separate elections. This costs extra money and makes it harder to get involved. What if there was method like the one above, but it could somehow allow information for every election to be gathered from only one interaction. This is where ranked choice voting comes in. You can imagine that if Bob ranked all the candidates, the eliminated candidates could be ignored and Bob's top remaining candidate could get his vote. At this point, you could do the same with everyone and effectively hold 5 different elections while only requiring one ballet per person. This procedure can be simplified into the following:

How Most Ranked Choice Voting Works

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the table below.

In this table, Carol and Dave clearly care most about the issue represented on the horizontal axis. However, everyone else has the ability to express their opinion on the other candidates' positions on issues other than the horizontal axis. Look through the tables below to see how the votes would be tallied up.

Candidate D wins.

Subnote

Additional Resources

Daniel Huang's Blog

Wikipedia