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You may have heard or read a lot about ranked choice voting recently. In New York City this year, voters selected the Democratic candidate for mayor through a ranked choice election. In Michigan, activists are circulating petitions for a proposal to adopt ranked choice voting in elections in the state, while legislators consider forbidding communities from implementing it.
What is ranked choice voting? Simply put, it’s one of several ways an election can be run. This method is typically geared toward elections that have more than two candidates. The point of any election — including those using ranked choice — is to capture the will of the people and give them some level of confidence in the way their leaders are chosen.
Ranked choice elections require more effort than a typical election — for the candidates and their campaigns, for the people who run elections and educate voters, for the people who vote, and for the people who have to count the votes. And because part of the process happens behind the scenes, it can be hard for voters to visualize how the winner is determined in a ranked choice system.
We’ll get into more of the pros and cons below. But first, how does ranked choice voting actually work? And how is it different from other types of elections in the United States, in terms of the process and the outcome?
To help explain this, Votebeat conducted an election of its own — to choose its new pet mascot. Naturally, we couldn’t do this election internally, as the members of our editorial staff were all too partial to their own housepets. (Don’t get them started.)
So over the course of several weeks, we asked Votebeat readers who subscribe to our newsletters to pick among the pet candidates nominated by the staff. (You can learn more about the candidates here). We asked participants to vote in both a traditional plurality-vote system and a ranked choice system.
More than 160 of our subscribers cast ballots, and thanks to them, we have real data to show you how the two systems compare.
We’ll first take a look at a plurality election — which is how most elections are conducted in the country — and then dive into ranked choice voting.
How plurality vote elections work
Most candidates are elected in the United States by a plurality vote, meaning that whoever gets the most votes wins, even if they don’t get the majority of all votes. In those elections, voters select one candidate on the list, and once all the votes are counted, the winner becomes clear. You’ve probably voted in one or several plurality elections, and possibly even run in one, for president of a local club, group, or union.
For our pet mascot election, we asked the electorate to make their choices in two different ways, starting with a plurality election. (Keep reading to see how the ranked choice version of this election turned out.)
In the plurality election, voters could pick only one of the nine animal candidates as their favorite. Here are the results:
You’ll see that with nine candidates in a plurality election, the votes are dispersed among all of the pets. Each one got at least six votes. But one of them — Walter the dog — got more votes than all the others, so Walter won this version of the election.
But Walter barely received a quarter of the vote. Most of the voters chose a different pet, which means the majority of voters may feel dissatisfied with the result.
So you may ask: Did the outcome of this election truly capture the will of the voters?
Outcomes like these are why some states will run a plurality election, followed by a runoff among the top two or three vote-getters, with the goal of ensuring that one candidate ultimately receives a majority of votes. Seven states require a candidate in a primary election to receive a majority of votes in order to be declared the winner, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and they use runoff elections to ensure that result.
Those runoffs are a new, separate election, held weeks or months after the first one. That means election officials have to schedule the new election, and create and distribute a new set of ballots. Candidates have to keep campaigning, and people who voted for someone who was not a top vote-getter have to choose a different candidate. Everyone must vote again.
What if voters could get to this point — and one of the candidates could garner a majority of votes — without a separate election? That is what ranked choice voting tries to achieve, and why some people refer to this method as an “instant runoff.”
How ranked choice elections work
Pros and cons of ranked choice voting
Advocates for ranked choice voting say it allows for better representation and a more accurate read on what most people actually want. That can be helpful in races with multiple candidates with similar views or in elections with viable third-party candidates. In New York City, some candidates with similar platforms formed alliances to urge their supporters to rank a particular candidate second, in case their first choice didn’t make it.
Ranked choice voting also allows for a single election, rather than requiring election officials to hold an entirely separate runoff. In places like Georgia, where runoffs are required when no candidate gets a majority of the votes, running a ranked choice election instead would help save time and money on election administration, and still ensure that one candidate can reach 50% support, with the help of second- and third-choice votes.
At least one study has found that ranked choice voting could improve turnout (although the science is still out).
Some critics say that the “majority” support that a candidate achieves through a ranked choice election is manufactured rather than an actual endorsement from voters. Others say the entire system is complex and confusing. In more than a dozen states, ranked choice voting is banned outright, and some that have adopted it, like Alaska, have considered repealing it.
A switch to ranked choice voting might avert a runoff, but it still involves some extra work and expense. Election officials would need to learn a new way to administer elections, and voters would have to learn a new way to vote. That requires significant voter education campaigns, especially for the first few elections after a switch. New York City allocated $15 million for a media blitz after voters there approved implementing ranked choice voting for primary elections several years ago, and the city continues to spend millions.
Another big criticism is that the multiple elimination rounds and redistribution of votes slow down the reporting of results. The timeline can vary depending on how automated the process is, the number of ballots, the number of candidates, and how fractured the vote is, which determines how many elimination rounds election administrators must go through before someone reaches a majority.
It also depends on decisions local officials make. In New York City, for instance, the Board of Elections waited a week after the Democratic mayoral primary to start tabulation, in part to allow for mailed ballots to be included. The results available on election night were unofficial tallies that included first-choice votes from early voting, Election Day, and some mail ballots.
As for official results, they usually take a few weeks to report in any election, including ones that use plurality voting.
How Votebeat’s ranked choice mascot election turned out
For Votebeat’s pet mascot election, we asked voters to rank the candidates from 1 to 9 in order of preference. Because of technical limitations on the ballots we used, we didn’t give voters the option to leave any candidates unranked, so everyone who voted assigned a ranking to all nine pets. We set the winning threshold at just over 50%, as it is in most ranked choice elections, although it can vary depending on state or local laws.
Our reporters’ and editors’ housepets have endured a long, hard-fought campaign. They committed themselves to honoring our process, and respecting the will of the voters. In all, 163 ballots were cast, and now, finally, the results are in. Who will be Votebeat’s next pet mascot, and how did this animal claw its way to the top?
Tap the arrows below, or the numbers designating each round, to see how the votes turned out.
Frequently asked questions
What happens if a voter doesn’t rank all the candidates in a ranked choice election?
Voters in ranked choice elections aren’t required to rank every candidate in the field, and sometimes, they aren’t permitted to rank more than a certain number. If they don’t rank everyone, though, they run into something called “ballot exhaustion” — the term for when your ballot doesn’t have enough ranked candidates and can no longer be considered.
Let’s say in a ranked choice election with five candidates, you rank only your favorite two. That’s your choice! If your first and second choices are both eliminated from contention because they’re the lowest vote-getters in a particular round, your ballot won’t be considered any further. That’s because it doesn’t have any more ranked choices left to count.
How do voters correct errors on their ranked choice ballot while voting?
Just as in any other election where you make a mistake, you can simply start over. In states where voters mark their ballots by hand, you can ask a poll worker to issue you a new ballot and void your original one. In states where voters use machines to mark their ballots, you should be able to clear the race or otherwise start over, just as you would in a plurality election.
How do you audit a ranked choice election?
Auditing is a process in any election to check the vote totals to ensure the results are accurate. Ranked choice elections are, generally speaking, audited the same way plurality elections are, said Rachael Cobb, an associate professor of political science at Suffolk University in Boston: Officials hand-count a select number of ballots to see if the results are consistent.
“The first thing is they gather all the ballots and sort by No. 1 votes for each,” she said. “You check all of those, and then you do the same thing again by looking at No. 2, and then the same thing for No. 3, and then so on.”
Different states audit elections differently, and it’s possible a government may select a new auditing option if it were to switch to ranked choice voting. But for most places, an audit of ranked choice ballots works as it would with a plurality. It just may take a bit longer to do properly.
What do the official results look like when they’re reported?
How the results are reported depends on how local election officials decide to represent them. In New York City, the results for the 2025 Democratic primary were presented in three rounds, with explanations on how and why candidates were eliminated, and how many votes were “transferred,” as seen below. The footnotes explain how multiple candidates — and not just the lowest vote-getter— can be eliminated from contention in a single round.
If you have other questions about ranked choice voting, please send them to community@votebeat.org.
Update, Oct. 30: This story was updated to clarify factors that could affect the timeline for reporting results of a ranked choice election.