How does ranked choice voting work?
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When you vote you rank your choices from most preferred to least preferred. If you dont like a candidate at all though, you dont have to list them. Once you do that. your done and are likely done having to think about voting unless something really unexpected happens. Everything that happens next is a part of the vote counting process.
During the vote counting process you have a threshold that someone needs to reach in order to win. Hypothetically we can say its 51% of the vote, but you can make it whatever you want, but you probably want it as a number that shows a decent majority for victory. Then you count up all the peoples preferred choices and see if someone managed to get above the threshold to win. If no one got over our threshold of 51% that we set, you drop the person with the least amount of votes. For everyone that listed the person dropped from the running as their first pick, their vote instead goes to their second preferred candidate instead. Then you simply repeat the process above until someone gets above the threshold. Dropping the lowest polling candidate and transferring their votes to the voters next preferred candidate.
Eventually someone will either win or in the unlikely situation that no one wins you do a special election where everyone has to vote again, but its just the two final candidates on the ballot with the majority winner winning.
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