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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No misinformation. All claims must be backed by credible sources.
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A Very Undemocratic Voting System Could Gain Ground This November (www.forbes.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I usually ignore the misinformation, but this one is direct from Forbes, and not just that but direct from Steve Forbes himself, and the directness of the lies are direct enough to be worth noting. A little bit.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No candidate received a “vote”

Nonsense. You receive your 1st preference votes, and then if no candidate has achieved an outright majority, the last candidate is eliminated and their 2nd preferences receive their votes, etc.

Yes, IRV involves giving preferences to candidates rather than just a simple single vote for a single candidate, but your vote is distributed according to your preferences and it's silly to talk about it as though votes don't go to candidates. That kind of language would make more sense for a system like range voting or maybe Borda Count, just not IRV where you can count the election by physically moving individual ballots into piles for each candidate and counting them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's a good point. I often see ranked choice being misrepresented (in the USA) by confusing the terminology and semantics like this, so I was just trying to emphasize the difference. But your explanation also makes sense and is accurate description of ranked choice as I understand it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah I was probably being a little extreme by starting that comment with "nonsense". But yeah we use IRV for most of our elections here in Australia, and it's very routine to talk about which candidate received which votes.