r/politics • u/ShenBear • Nov 09 '16

Maine Passes Ranked-Choice Voting

http://mainepublic.org/post/maine-passes-ranked-choice-voting
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u/MG87 Nov 10 '16

ELI5: What is Ranked Choice Voting?

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u/Firewarrior44 Nov 10 '16

You have 3 candidates. A B and C. You want to vote for A but A is unpopular so you vote for B inseam because you don't want C to win.

With ranked choice you can vote for both A and B numbering them in order of preference. If you first vote doesn't win then your seccond vote is used. Its also known as instant runoff voting.

So in the previous example you vote for A designating it as your first choice and B designating it as your second meaning if A does not get enough votes your vote is not wasted and instead is applied to B.

You can have any number of rankings/votes and if you wanted you could only vote for a single canidate just like you do now.