![]() Trump won Michigan by 10,700 Stein received more than 51,000 votes. ![]() And if we can assume that most Stein voters would have chosen Clinton as their second choice, the former Secretary of State would have won, according to Saari. Because neither candidate received a majority of the Michigan vote, ranked-choice voting would have come into play. If a ranked-choice voting system had been in place in Michigan, then Clinton, not Trump, may have won that state. (Trump, of course, still won the election, though he lost the popular vote to Clinton.) Again, the 2016 election offers a good hypothetical example. Michael Bloomberg, a centrist, third-party candidate, considered running in the 2016 presidential election but decided not to upon concluding that he might split the Democratic vote with Clinton, increasing the chances of Trump’s victory. “A goal of Nader’s Green Party was to reach a certain percentage of the total vote, which is a reason why many Nader voters did not want to vote for their second-ranked Gore.”īecause it helps eliminate vote-splitting, a ranked-choice voting system can have the effect of encouraging more third-party and centrist candidates, advocates say. (Florida was the center of a vote-counting scandal, and Bush’s narrow win there ensured his ascension to the White House, despite losing the popular vote nationwide.) “Gore was the second-place choice of many of Ralph Nader’s supporters, particularly in the states of Florida and New Hampshire, where Bush narrowly won,” says Saari. Bush won a majority of the vote, says Don Saari, author of Decisions and Elections. If ranked-choice voting had been in place at the time, Democrat Al Gore may have prevailed in the key state of Florida, where neither Gore nor Republican George W. The most notorious example of this is the 2000 presidential election, when nearly 3 million mostly left-leaning voters cast their ballots for third-party candidate Ralph Nader. That’s called the “Nader” effect or the “spoiler” effect. It can lead to vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions, resulting in a candidate who is less popular overall being elected, experts say. Ranked-choice voting advocates argue that the plurality system doesn’t always reflect the true will of the people. (If Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a voter’s first choice, for instance, she would have been given the option of choosing a different candidate-Clinton, Trump, etc.-as her second choice.) had a ranked-choice voting system, voters would have been asked to choose a second choice, third choice or more. Under the current system, in each of those states, the candidate with the most votes was declared victorious. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received less than 50% of the total vote in 12 states, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. Take the last presidential election, for example. If ranked-choice voting was adopted nationwide, it would fundamentally change how U.S. How ranked-choice voting could affect U.S. New York City will join Maine in using instant-runoff voting. Ranked-choice voting works in a variety of contexts. The winning candidate almost always ends up with a majority of votes-even if some portion of the electorate selected him or her as a second or third choice. In a ranked-choice voting system, it works differently. It doesn’t matter whether that candidate earned the majority of the vote. federal government and most American states and cities currently use what’s known as the plurality system: the candidate with the highest number of votes wins-period. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. ![]() Instead of just choosing who you want to win, you fill out the ballot saying who is your first choice, second choice, or third choice (or more as needed) for each position. Ranked-choice voting is an electoral system that allows people to vote for multiple candidates, in order of preference. ![]() Here’s what to know about ranked-choice voting.
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