I just saw a post on Alaska and ranked choice voting. I thought I understood it. Now I don’t.
Help please.
In: 2
In a two (or more) party system where one party may have two (or more) candidates while the other (or more) party has one, AND the first party splits their vote, the second party be elected despite having few votes than the other party. Instead of traditional voting where you vote for one candidate (or party in most cases), you vote for your first choice, then your second, then third, fourth, and so on.
Think of it as something like “I want this person, but if I can’t have they/them, I would have this other person, then this person”.
Instead of just voting for one candidate, you rank all the candidates – so you have a first choice, second choice, third choice etc.
Then they start to by tallying the votes only the first choices. If more than 50% of the people picked a certain candidate as their first choice, then this person wins. Otherwise, they take the candidate who received the least number of votes and remove them from the ballot. Everyone who was ranked below them is moved up a rank (so if I picked them as first choice, now my second choice becomes my first).
They tally the votes again. If no candidate won more than 50%, they repeat the process until one candidate does.
You number every candidate in order of preference, 1 for your favourite then 2,3,4…
When the vote is counted all the candidates receive their number 1’s (first preference). The candidate with the lowest amount of votes is removed and their votes are redistributed to the candidate who is number 2 (second preference). Repeat until you have 2 candidates and the one with the most votes is the winner.
Hillary and DJT both sucked, none of us wanted to vote for either. But, if a magical, third person had been running, we couldn’t vote for them because we did have a preference for one of them over the other and magical third party candidate had no chance because – two party system. In ranked choice you can say, ‘I vote for magical #3’ unless they don’t get enough votes to win and it comes down to Hillary vs DJT, in which case, I vote for <the less terrible of those two IMO>.
Mostly. There’s a chance that one of the major party candidates gets a majority in the first round and your second choice vote never gets registered.
There’s a few different ways of doing it, but what ranked choice voting means is that instead of getting one vote for one candidate, you can rank as many candidates as you like in order of preference.
I don’t know what Alaska uses specifically, but most places use Single Transferable Vote.
All the voter needs to do is rank as many candidates as they want in order of preference. You put a 1 next to your favourite, a 2 next to who you’d want to win if your first choice is eliminated, a 3 next to your third choice, and so on. You can rank every candidate, or you can just vote for your favourite and say that if they don’t win you don’t care who does.
In the actual election, the votes are counted up. To win a seat, a candidate needs to get 100% of the vote divided by how many seats are up for grabs. So if there are only 2 seats they need 50% of the vote, if there are 3 seats they need 33%, if there are 4 they need 25%, and so on.
After the first round of voting, they see if anyone wins a seat. If there are still seats remaining and nobody has enough votes to claim them, then the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and everyone who voted for them has their vote transferred to their second choice.
Again, check if anyone has enough votes to win, if there are still unclaimed seats you transfer the votes to the second and third choices again, and repeat until all the seats are filled.
The advantage of that is that you don’t have to worry about tactical voting. You just vote for your favourite candidates. You don’t have to worry about splitting the vote because your vote will get transferred if your unlikely favourite candidate doesn’t get many votes.
And while the process of deciding the winner might seem a little complicated to some, the voter doesn’t actually need to understand any of that. Everyone knows how to rank things in order of preference, and they don’t even need to do that if they only want to pick one.
The system is sometimes called an “instant run-off” election because it effectively works under the rough rules of a run-off election, but you don’t have to go to the polls multiple times. Instead you put who you want to vote for first, then your 2nd choice is who you’d vote for if that person didn’t run at all, and so on and so forth. You may stop at any time.
During the first “round”, only 1st choices are considered. If someone exceeds 50%, they win. If nobody reaches the goal, the person with the fewest votes is eliminated, and anybody who voted for them 1st have their voted bumped over to their 2nd choice. The process repeats until either someone exceeds 50%.
It’s not perfect. If literally everybody had the same 2nd choice, you’d think that person would be a decent choice as a winner. But it means they got literally zero 1st choice votes, and are the first to be eliminated (assuming nobody else got 50%)
If you’re interested in learning about ranked voting, I’d highly recommend checkout out [this video](https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE) by CGP Grey on YouTube, that explains the system. He also has videos on [Single Transferable Vote](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI) systems, and a few other alternative voting systems. Highly recommend them all (and the rest of his videos too lol)
“Ranked choice” refers to the *ballot*. On a ranked choice ballot, you can mark several candidates in order (1=your favorite, 2=your second favorite, 3=your third favorite, and so on.)
Alaska counts its ranked choice ballots by a method called “instant runoff.” Basically this means you count the ballots; if nobody has a majority, you eliminate the candidate with the least votes and recount.
– On the first count, every ballot counts for the candidate marked #1.
– On the recounts, every ballot counts for the highest candidate that hasn’t been eliminated yet.
So if 40 people D-#1, 45 people vote R-#1, 13 people vote G-#1 D-#2, and 2 people vote G-#1 R-#2, on the first round the totals are D-40 R-45 G-15. So the G candidate is eliminated. On the second round the totals are D-52 R-47, meaning D has a majority and is elected.
(Numbers made up, but the overall scenario is loosely based on the 2000 US Presidential election.)
[1] Instant runoff eliminates the *worst* performing candidate(s) and re-shuffles the *losers’* votes. There’s another counting method called [Single Transferable Vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes) that elects the *best* performing candidates and re-shuffles the *winners’* extra votes, it’s sort of like ranked choice voting “in reverse.”
IRV tends to be used more for elections with a single winner (like most American elections), while STV is used more for elections of a large body with a goal of proportional representation (like most European parliamentary elections).
STV and IRV are both ranked choice, the ballots and voter experience are identical, but the counting methods are different.
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