Ranked Choice Voting

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Welcome to the Ranked Choice Voting Community!

Voting is broken! Let's fix it.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a voting system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, they are declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates, based on the next preference on each ballot. This process continues until one candidate has a majority. Learn more about how it works.

Why Ranked Choice Voting?

Prevents the tyranny of the middle
Encourages diversity of candidates
Discourages negative campaigning
Provides more choice for voters
Saves money by avoiding runoff elections

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Maine's 2nd Congressional District race will go to ranked choice voting tabulation, officials say (www.wmtw.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If I'm honest, it sounds like a mess. More and more, I'm thinking that STAR is a better system.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That is an incredibly long and wordy article to basically say "IRV is doing what it's supposed to do". Some voters choosing to skip their first preference is…weird, and probably should have just meant their second preference was counted as their first, and the fact that they don't do a full distribution of preferences all the time is strange for the sake of having the complete data, but fundamentally this isn't really messy at all, from what I can see.

[–] LemoineFairclough 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A ballot that contains 1 skipped ranking before its highest continuing ranking is interesting. I suppose that means a voter is expressing "I only want to participate in an election for an office elected by ranked-choice voting: if there aren't 3 or more candidates I don't want to participate". Such a ballot is not necessarily an "Exhausted ballot":

"Exhausted ballot" means a ballot that does not rank any continuing candidate, contains an overvote at the highest continuing ranking or contains 2 or more sequential skipped rankings before its highest continuing ranking.

Note that there are more resources I found at https://www.legislature.maine.gov/lawlibrary/ranked-choice-voting-in-maine/9509

It's interesting that the text of Washington, D.C., Initiative 83, Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative (November 2024) is similar to the Maine statutes, but specifically says that voters should be informed that they should not skip a ranking:

“Inactive ballot” means a ballot on which no active candidate is ranked, contains an overvote at the highest ranking of active candidates, or contains 2 or more sequential skipped rankings before its highest-ranked active candidate.

Each ballot shall contain instructions informing the voter of the following, [...] That the voter should not give more than one candidate the same ranking, rank a candidate more than once, or skip a ranking.