ELi5: Ranked Choice Voting

Question

I just saw a post on Alaska and ranked choice voting. I thought I understood it. Now I don’t.
Help please.

In: 2

Answer 1

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.