Ranked ballots

With proportional ranked choice voting, voters vote for their favorite candidate first, and then they rank back-up choices. The ballot allows them to say which candidate is their first choice, their second choice, and so on. A ranked ballot may look exactly the same whether it is used to elect a single winner or elect multiple winners proportionally, except that the multi-winner ballot may include more choices, more write-in lines, and/or words like “three to be elected” in the instructions.

In most of the world, ballots are hand-counted, allowing voters to rank candidates by writing numbers next to each one: a “1” for their first choice, a “2” for their second choice, and so on. The below ballot is an example from Ireland.

However, in the United States, the number of elections and elected offices makes machine-counting a necessity in most places. Machines can read hand-written numerals, and optical character recognition technology has been used to read such ranked ballots in Scotland and Australia, but it has not yet been used in American elections. Instead, most American ranked ballots are a grid of bubbles, where voters fill in the bubble for their first choice, then for their second choice, and so on. The ballot below was used in Cambridge, Massachusetts to elect the six-seat Cambridge School Committee using proportional ranked choice voting.

The Center for Civic Design produces an invaluable booklet describing the best practices for designing ranked ballot. They found that voters are able to rank candidates without difficulty on any ballot style, provided that it is designed using the best practices that apply to ranked and non-ranked ballots alike. Their guide examines grid ballots, “adapted optical scan” ballots (for older, legacy equipment), hand-numbered ballots, and electronic accessible ballots. The Center for Civic Design also provides advice for ranked choice voting voter education and election results.