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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Not true in my own personal observation. Where I live, the dems had two candidates, republicans had four, undeclared had 2, and third party each had 1 (Green party and I can't remember).
Vote scoring took 5 or 6 rounds to declare a winner - it came down to 1 of the dems (incumbent) vs. most notable republican on ballot (former mayor). Dem won by 34 votes in a town of around 70,000 registered voters. Republican candidate was leading each round until the last when one of the third party candidates got eliminated.
I can see things getting iffy when it needs to go that far to get to a winner. An extreme example would be if candidate A got 49% of the initial vote, but didn't get their name on any other ballots and the winner was B who only had, say, 10% of the first-choice votes.
Then again, in this scenario, candidate A would have been extremely unpopular with 51% of of the population.
One thing you can definitively say from your own observed result is that the former mayor didn't have support of more than 50% of the voters, whereas the incumbent did (even if the voters were less inclined to put their support behind him/her)
I still think ranked choice is a rigged game - one voter, one vote is the only honest election method - prove me wrong.
"One voter, one vote" is how we found ourselves in a two-party system. Having more than two options is a good thing.
You have the option to vote for a third party candidate in the one voter, one vote system so your argument falls flat right there. You must like easily corrupted systems. If it's "new" and it's being pushed by the democrats and RINOs, it has to be something that further cements their ability to cheat.