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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 2058575" data-attributes="member: 1264">Allow me...Alternative Vote, aka Instant Runoff Voting or Preferential Voting essentially simulates a series of runoff elections, without needing to get the voters to the ballot box over and over.Let's consider for a moment a simple winner-takes-all election, with the stipulation that the winner has to achieve more than 50% of the votes.If any of the candidates get 50% or more of the vote in the 1st round, he wins. Otherwise, you hold a runoff election in which the candidate with the least votes is removed from the running. Problem is, you'd have to get all those voters to vote again (and again, and again, until you've kicked out enough low-scoring candidates that the top candidates gets 50% of the vote).An easy way around having to have several actual rounds of voting is to assume that only those voters who originally voted for the least popular candidate will change their votes. More specifically, since their favorite candidate is out of the race, they will vote for their second choice in the runoff election. And if that candidate gets kicked out in the next round, they'll vote for their third choice etc.The upshot is that if you ask the voters to give a full *ranking* of all the candidates, you can do these runoff elections without ever having to ask the votesr to return to the ballot box. Hence the term "Instant Runoff".In Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), if any candidate gets more than 50% of 1st-choice votes, he wins. Otherwise, you remove the candidate with the least 1st-choice votes. For all those voters who picked this worst candidate as 1st choice, you now simply count their second choice as 1st choice. Check if any candidate now gets 50% of 1st-choice votes. If not, you remove the candidate with the least 1st-choice votes, update the rankings, etcetera.</blockquote>

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