Voting method
Rank candidates, multiple winners
Like ranked choice, but elects multiple winners. Surplus votes from winners and eliminated candidates transfer proportionally. Ensures diverse representation.
Best for
Electing boards, committees, or councils
Configuration
Worked example
Twelve members elect two representatives to the board. With two seats, the quota is 5 votes.
12 voters rank the candidates for 2 seats. The quota - the votes needed to win a seat - is floor(12 / (2 + 1)) + 1 = 5.
Ada reaches the quota and is elected. Margaret has the fewest votes and is eliminated. Those ballots carry on to their next ranked choices.
Grace reaches the quota and is elected.
Ready to run a Multi-winner poll?
Create a Multi-winner 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.