Ranked voting
Family of electoral systems / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term ranked voting refers to any voting system where voters order candidates or options from most to least preferred on their ballots. For example,Dowdall's method assigns 1, 1⁄2, 1⁄3... points to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... candidates on each ballot, then totals the votes for each candidate. Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted, which gives each one very different properties.
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Ranked voting systems are usually contrasted with rated voting methods, which allow voters to indicate how strongly they support different candidates (e.g. on a scale from 0-10).[1] Rated voting systems use more information than ordinal ballots; as a result, they are not subject to many of the problems with ranked voting (including results like Arrow's theorem).
Although not usually described as such, the most common ranked voting system is the well-known plurality rule, where each voter gives a single point to the candidate ranked first and zero points to all others. The most common non-degenerate ranked voting rule is the closely-related alternative vote, a staged variant of the plurality system that repeatedly eliminates last-place plurality winners.
In the United States and Australia, the terms ranked-choice voting and preferential voting are usually used to refer to the alternative or single transferable vote by way of conflation. However, terms these have also been used to refer to ranked voting systems in general.[2]