About the Ranked-Choice Poll

How should I vote?

Rank the candidates you support (first is best). If you don't support a candidate at all, don't rank that candidate. Ranking a second choice can't hurt the chances of your first choice, and ranking a third choice can't hurt the chances of either your first or second choice.

How are votes counted?

All ballots are counted toward their highest eligible ranking. If no candidate has a majority of the counted votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and is no longer eligible to receive votes. The ballots are re-counted. This process continues until a candidate gets a majority.

Which candidate received my vote?

Look at the results for the final round. At that point, your vote counted toward the remaining candidate who ranked highest on your ballot. If you did not rank any of the remaining candidates, your vote was counted among those with "all choices eliminated".

What happens if I skip a ranking?

Only the order of your rankings matters, so if you made a third choice but no second choice, it will be treated as a second choice.

Why didn't the totals change after I voted?

They did - try pressing your browser's 'Refresh' button.

I still don't get it!

We want to make sure that everyone who uses this site leaves with a comfortable understanding of how ranked-choice voting works. Please send your questions using our feedback form.

I disagree with the results!

The results are shown only so people can see how the count works. The purpose of this site is to help as many people as possible become comfortable with Ranked-Choice Voting, and people are welcome to vote as many times as it takes for them to achieve this. It is a fundamental limitation of any web poll that there is no convenient way to keep a highly accurate record of who votes and how often (however, we do offer a decent solution for smaller-scale invitation-only polls). Furthermore, our marketing budget is $0, so we can't even dream of reaching enough San Francisco voters to ensure an unbiased, statistically valid sample. We have chosen to make a demonstration poll using the actual candidates because this stirs up enough emotion to get people to participate without our having to spend money on advertising. A disadvantage of this is that some fraction of users will become irate. In the past we have tried using polls with more abstract topics, but they just don't get a significant number of votes. If you disagree with the results, our recommendation is to invite a few hundred of your friends to vote for your more preferred candidate.