How are Ranked Vote Results tabulated?

[michele shute]

I could not find how ranked votes are tabulated.   I am giving a list of 197 names and asking our voters to add their 20 favorite names to their ballot and then rank those 20 and submit their ballot.   How does the ranked vote weight each ranked choice exactly?  How do the results look in the end?

[Team OpaVote]

Hello Michele,

There are many different ways to tabulate the ranked choice ballots and we support a lot of them. To choose winners among several candidates, single transferable vote (STV) is a good choice because the results are usually a good representation of voters' preferences. More specifically, we recommend Scottish STV for most cases because it's well-defined, straightforward, and widely used.

You can read more in our help pages about STV, our plain-English explanation of Scottish STV, or the exact rules for Scottish STV. You can also see an example of election results in our demo election.

I recommend against asking voters to choose among 197 candidates to rank. What often happens in an election like that is that no candidate gets a lot of votes and the winner is often chosen at random from candidates with very few votes.

You'll get much better results if you first narrow the candidates down before doing a ranked-choice election. For example, you can run an election using checkbox voting with all 197 candidates. Allow voters to choose several candidates, then take the top 10 or so vote-getters and use a ranked-choice vote to pick one.

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

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