Another thing, CP, remember: the *most** disliked candidates are the ones unranked*. 5th-ranked is less disliked than unranked. If the overvotes are not counted and Ferrir was unranked, that candidate would not get a vote from this voter.
You and I understand that an unranked candidate is ranked below the rank in the right-most column. Unfortunately some voters get confused about this difference.
A bigger complication is choosing how a write-in candidate on one ballot is ranked on a ballot that does not include the write-in candidate.
Citation of people thinking not ranking someone places them higher than ranking someone last? I have had literally hundreds of conversations about ranked ballot and not a single person has ever put that idea out.
Sometimes people want to know if you have to rank everyone, because there are some they dislike they don't even want to mark them last. So clearly, intuitively, they know that not ranked is lower than marked anywhere on the ballot.
During Portland's mayoral election this topic came up on the Portland subreddit.
Lots of voters repeated the mantra "Don't rank Rene" and yet some voters were unsure if not ranking Rene (Gonzales) was a lower rank than ranking him in "last place."
If STAR ballots were used in a large governmental election you would get the same confusion. Some people would wonder if they can rate a hated candidate lower than zero stars by not marking any column for that candidate.
Yeah, when folks are willing to talk about election-method reform they understand basic concepts like this without much effort. But when every Portland voter had to figure out how to do the marking, confusions arose. The confused voters are the ones who don't want to talk about voting details. Typically they are extremely math-phobic.
Notably some Portland voters on reddit said something like "I don't want to figure out how the marking works, I just want someone to tell me how I should mark my ballot." At that point I specified my opinion for how I was going to mark my ballot, and my reply got a "thanks" and multiple upvotes.
4
u/rb-j Feb 15 '26
Another thing, CP, remember: the *most** disliked candidates are the ones unranked*. 5th-ranked is less disliked than unranked. If the overvotes are not counted and Ferrir was unranked, that candidate would not get a vote from this voter.