In ranked-choice voting, a candidate needs more than 50 percent of the vote to be declared the winner outright. If the front-runner doesn’t have that percentage of the vote, the candidate with the fewest votes that round drops off the ballot, and those who ranked that candidate first will have their votes go to their second choice. The process continues until a candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.
The state’s special House race election will be the only race with ranked-choice voting on Tuesday, but it will provide a preview of how other candidates running in races such as the state’s Senate election will do in November.
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If you can figure out a way to do it with machines or people doing math, score voting (or range voting is another name for the same thing) is the ideal voting method.
With RCV you can get a lot of unintended consequences, whereas score voting gives absolute choice to voters without fear of fucking things up.
Imagine this scenario and we will play it out with both RCV and Score Voting:
3 Candidates, 3 Voters
Candidate 1, Candidate 2, Candidate 3
Voter A, Voter B, Voter C (which will have the same preferences for both RCV & Score voting examples below)
Ranked Choice Example:
Voter A: 1, 2, 3
Voter B: 1, 2, 3
Voter C: 3, 2, 1
Winner: Candidate 1
Score Voting Example (let's use 0-9 for simplicity)
Voter A: (Candidate 1: 9, Candidate 2: 8, Candidate 3: 0)
Voter B: (Candidate 1: 9, Candidate 2: 8, Candidate 3: 0)
Voter C: (Candidate 1: 0, Candidate 2: 8, Candidate 3: 9)
Winner: Candidate 2
So why does this happen? If there is a majority (more than 50%) of voters selecting a candidate on their first round then that person is the winner. Candidate 1 got a majority and wins with RCV.
Everyone REALLY likes candidate 2 so with score voting they all gave 2 a nearly perfect score. 2 wins with the best average.
Score voting gives voters more of an opportunity to express themselves and give an honest opinion on their vote. Hell, if a voter hated all the candidates and only kind of liked one... they wouldn't even have to give any candidates a perfect score.
And before anybody says STAR voting is good, it's not. STAR voting still artificially fucks with your vote.