Political Mechanisms
Ranked-Choice Voting
Also Known As Preferential Voting · Alternative Vote
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
An electoral method, also called instant-runoff voting or the alternative vote, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing only one. If no candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and that candidate's ballots are transferred to the voters' next-ranked choice, and the count repeats until one candidate holds a majority. Proposed independently by more than one writer in the 1870s, it was first adopted for a national parliament in Australia in 1918, for the House of Representatives, where it remains in use, and has since been adopted for some state and municipal elections in the United States under the name ranked-choice voting.
Facts
Origin YearFirst national adoption, for the Australian House of Representatives. The method was proposed independently by more than one writer in the 1870s, decades before any government adopted it; 1918 marks first practical use in a national parliament, not first proposal. Founding ContextRanked choice voting, also called instant runoff voting or the alternative vote depending on the country, was designed to let voters express a fuller order of preference than a single choice allows, so that if no candidate wins a majority of first preferences outright, lower ranked preferences can be redistributed to determine a winner without a separate runoff election. Australia's House of Representatives, adopting it in 1918, was the first national parliament to use the method. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Both methods count preferences by transferring eliminated or surplus votes rather than holding a separate runoff election; single transferable vote extends the same ranked-ballot logic to multi-member districts to achieve proportionality, while ranked-choice voting is used in single-winner contests.
The UK held a 2011 referendum on adopting the alternative vote, which more than two-thirds of voters rejected.
Influenced
Why this is disputed. Ranked-choice voting is, like first past the post, a single-winner method, so whether it escapes Duverger's law's two-party prediction or merely delays it is genuinely disputed: some scholars find its elimination-and-transfer process weakens the psychological pressure toward two dominant candidates that plurality voting creates, others find the underlying single-winner mechanics reassert themselves once a race narrows to two credible contenders.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.