Voting method
Rank candidates in order
Voters rank candidates from first to last choice. If no one wins a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes transfer to the next choice. Repeat until someone has a majority.
Best for
Electing a single winner when you want broad consensus
Configuration
Worked example
Eleven neighbors rank four lunch spots. First choice gets their vote - until someone is eliminated.
11 voters rank the 4options. Only each ballot's highest-ranked surviving option counts in any round.
No one has the 6 votes needed for a majority. Salad has the fewest and is eliminated - every Salad ballot moves to its next ranked choice for the next round.
No one has the 6 votes needed for a majority. Sushi has the fewest and is eliminated - every Sushi ballot moves to its next ranked choice for the next round.
Pizza holds 7 of 11 active ballots - more than the 6 needed for a majority - and wins.
Ready to run a Ranked Choice poll?
Create a Ranked Choice pollEdge cases
Sometimes two candidates tie for last place and one of them has to be eliminated. ClearVote first tries the Next-Preference Cascade: look only at the tied candidates on each ballot and ask which of them voters prefer least. If that singles one out, that candidate is eliminated - the decision reflects real voter preference, not arbitrary order.
If voters give no further signal - every still-tied candidate is preferred equally often - the tie is broken by lot: a shuffle seeded from the raw ballot data itself. The draw is impartial and blind to candidate names, yet fully reproducible - anyone re-running the tally on the same ballots gets the same result.