“Voters in Massachusetts and Alaska will decide in November whether they want to implement ranked-choice voting for some of their state races.
If voters approve, they’ll join Maine, which in November will be the first state to use ranked-choice voting for the presidential race.
In ranked-choice voting (sometimes called “instant runoff voting”), citizens don’t just select one of the candidates for an office (though they can if they want to). They are permitted to rank each of the candidates on the basis of preference.
To win a ranked-choice election, one must receive more than 50 percent of the vote, not just a plurality. If no candidate has a majority, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated from contention. Then the votes are tallied again. If you ranked the eliminated candidate as your first choice, your second choice is instead tallied as your vote. And so the process goes until a candidate gets more than 50 percent. “