Ranked Choice Voting

Discussions center on the pros, cons, and strategic issues of ranked choice voting (RCV/IRV), often comparing it to alternatives like approval voting, score voting, STAR, and referencing Arrow's impossibility theorem.

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Keywords

e.g US youtube.com ncase.me maine.gov StrawPoll HN STAR rankpoll.me google.com voting ranked choice approval vote ballot candidate voters ballots preferences

Sample Comments

lobsterthief Nov 6, 2024 View on HN

Ranked choice voting is the only path to this.

_AzMoo Jun 23, 2021 View on HN

Why is Instant Runoff Voting the worst possible voting method?

AnthonyMouse Mar 2, 2025 View on HN

Ranked choice was the error. You want one of the cardinal voting systems like STAR.

r3dk1ng Feb 7, 2016 View on HN

something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting?

api Apr 26, 2022 View on HN

Look into ranked choice voting. That could help.

addisonl Apr 28, 2023 View on HN

Ranked choice voting appears to be an easy solution, am I wrong?

dragonwriter Sep 9, 2025 View on HN

Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) is the single worst of the very many seriously proposed ranked ballots method; it retains most of what is bad about FPTP. It is somewhat easier to tally than the best (in terms of the logic of who wins) ranked ballots methods (methods satisfying the Condorcet criterion), but not particularly good even on that among all ranked ballots methods, e.g., it can be improved in that dimension by just adding all preferences of the next rank until a candida

ajslater Nov 15, 2016 View on HN

That's not a flaw. One reason I prefer Approval Voting is that it makes this clear. Approval Voting works the same as RCV but without ranking. Vote for all candidates you approve of.The "bayesian regret" is almost as good as RCV, but it's much simpler and doesn't suffer from the misperception you highlighted.https://electology.org/approval-voting

tdeck Jul 16, 2017 View on HN

Ranked choice voting is still fundamentally flawed [1]. Voters will be incentivized to vote strategically in this system rather than according to their preference, just as they do now.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

pspeter3 Nov 14, 2018 View on HN

Is ranked choice voting not susceptible to strategic voting?