Rank The Vote KY | Our Name
As the lead in charge of Supporter Onboarding at Rank The Vote KY I am always looking for ways to make Ranked Choice Voting accessible to people who may never have heard about it. I love learning by doing, so let’s do a Ranked Choice Voting poll!
The Candidates
Our budding RCV group here in Kentucky has plenty that we need to set up: filing with KY Secretary of State, setting up our bank account to take donations, and a domain name. But we were missing one thing that was necessary for all these and that is our actual name!
We asked for suggestions from everyone in our group and came up with a couple candidates…
Kentuckians For Ranked Choice Voting
Better Ballot Kentucky
Win, Place, Show Up And Vote
Rank The Vote Kentucky
Voter Choice Kentucky
and many others…
So we have our candidate names, but how do we use Ranked Choice Voting to pick a winner? And first, what the heck is Ranked Choice Voting?
What is Ranked Choice Voting??
A great question. A lot of people only know our current way of voting. When trying to choose a winner often we cast a single vote for who we want to win, add up all those single votes, and whomever has the most is declared the winner. This method of choosing a winner is known as First Past The Post or Plurality Voting. Plurality means simply more than anyone else.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is another way to choose a winner from a list of candidates. Instead of making a single choice, we can rank any candidates we approve of in descending order. So for me I looooved Win, Place, Show Up And Vote (shout out to Larry for that wonderful Kentucky branded name) but I also really liked Voter Choice Kentucky & would feel good with Kentuckians For Ranked Choice Voting.
RCV has many benefits that we will detail in future posts, but for now lets get right into how you vote and how you choose a winner.
RCV In Action
How to Vote
To vote you rank the choices you approve of in descending order. You don’t have to rank everyone. You can rank as few or as many candidates as you want. So my vote would be
Rank 1 Win, Place, Show Up And Vote
Rank 2 Voter Choice Kentucky
Rank 3 Kentuckians For Ranked Choice Voting
How To Determine A Winner
Using RCV a winner is declared if they have a majority, or 50% + 1, of the votes. First, we count all Rank 1 votes. If a candidate has a majority then just like Plurality Voting we have a winner!
What you see here is everyone’s Rank 1 votes. No one has a majority, so now what? In RCV if there is no winner in that round we eliminate the last place candidate. Anyone who voted for the candidate eliminated in that round has their next ranked choice count towards the totals. Their Rank 1 choice has been eliminated by virtue of being last place, but that doesn’t mean their vote doesn’t matter. It moves on to the next round…
It is important to note that these “rounds” only use your original ranked vote. The steps we are going to detail below happen automatically behind the scenes by whomever is tallying the votes, usually a computer!
By virtue of being in last place with the least amount of Rank 1 votes we eliminate Win, Place, Show Up And Vote. My Rank 1 choice has been eliminated, but that doesn’t mean my vote is useless! My next ranked choice Voter Choice Kentucky is now part of the totals. We still don’t have a majority winner, so on to Round 3…
Last place in the previous round was Kentuckians For Voter Choice. Two voters had listed them as their Rank 1 choice. Those two ballots have their next ranked choice included in the totals. You can see that one of those voters had Rank The Vote Kentucky as their Rank 2 choice and one of those voters had Kentuckians For Ranked Choice Voting as their Rank 2 choice.
Still no majority, so we continue the elimination of the last place candidate.
3 voters had Voter Choice Kentucky as their highest ranked remaining candidate. Similar to previous rounds, the vote for the eliminated candidate are replaced with their next ranked choice. In this case, those next ranked choices are split evenly amongst the remaining three candidates.
Following along with my specific ballot… If you remember, one of those votes was my Rank 2 vote. My Rank 1 vote for Win, Place, Show Up And Vote had been eliminated in the first found, and my Rank 2 vote for Voter Choice Kentucky was eliminated this round. My Rank 3 vote for Rank The Vote Kentucky is now part of the tally.
And finally a winner! A candidate is declared the winner with a majority of the votes. As the title of this post is a spoiler, you already know that Rank The Vote Kentucky is the newest in a growing list of State organizations educating citizens on the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting.
If you want to see each round for yourself you can see all the results of our name vote here. Big shoutout to rankit.vote where you can make your own RCV poll!
So What?
This is a simple example used just to illustrate the mechanics behind Ranked Choice Voting. But the impact of RCV shows up in a number of positive ways when applied to American electoral politics. Positive outcomes like removing the need to vote strategically (that inner monologue of “Well, I really like this other candidate but they would never win, I guess I’ll vote _____ instead…ugh”) and increased competition on the ballot. I’ll dive into these positive outcomes in our next post!
Until then, if you are interested in getting involved with Rank The Vote KY or just want to stay up to date please sign up here. Or get more information at our next Statewide Meeting on March 4 where we’ll go over why Rank The Vote KY exists and what we’re trying to accomplish. Details for that meeting are here!
