Per-contest instructions for ranking when full vote is not required

[Ted Romer]

Our organization is following the (extremely helpful!) guidance from FairVote and OpaVote to hold an endorsement vote using RCV requiring a super-majority.

Our ballot instructions include the recommended text, Please rank the candidates that you consider worthy of endorsement in order of preference. If all of the candidates you rank are eliminated, your ballot will count for No Endorsement instead.

I'm concerned that people who jump straight into voting will read the instructions for each election, Use the buttons to add choices to the ballot, and then drag to arrange them in order of preference with your most preferred at the top and your least preferred at the bottom, and not realize that they should omit candidates that they do not want the organization to endorse.

We'll do our best to address this with education, but I wonder if a tweak to OpaVote would be more robust.

Here's a suggestion: For RCV contests that don't require a full vote, add to the end of  instructions for each contest lf all the candidates you rank are eliminated, your vote will indicate "No preference".

Thoughts?

Ted

[Team OpaVote]

Hi Ted,

I think that a great idea. We are hoping to make it easier for organizations to choose endorsements with RCV. I've added your idea as something to consider when we get to that work. Thank you for the suggestion.

Best,
-- Damien
Team OpaVote
https://opavote.com

{#HS:3354734594-838#}

On Sat, Jun 13, 2026 at 11:25 PM UTC, Ted Romer <tro...@gmail.com> wrote:

Our organization is following the (extremely helpful!) guidance from
FairVote

<https://fairvote.org/report/best-practices-for-using-ranked-choice-voting-to-endorse-candidates&gt;
and OpaVote
<https://blog.opavote.com/2017/12/ranked-choice-voting-with-supermajority.html&gt;

to hold an endorsement vote using RCV requiring a super-majority.

Our ballot instructions include the recommended text, *Please rank the

candidates that you consider worthy of endorsement in order of preference.
If all of the candidates you rank are eliminated, your ballot will count

for No Endorsement instead.*

I'm concerned that people who jump straight into voting will read the

instructions for each election, *Use the buttons to add choices to the

ballot, and then drag to arrange them in order of preference with your most

preferred at the top and your least preferred at the bottom, *and

not realize that they should omit candidates that they do not want the
organization to endorse.

We'll do our best to address this with education, but I wonder if a tweak
to OpaVote would be more robust.

Here's a suggestion: For RCV contests that don't require a full vote, add

to the end of instructions for each contest *lf all the candidates you
rank are eliminated, your vote will indicate "No preference"*.

Thoughts?
Ted