A new form of deciding "tied" votes

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

The best chance of winning would be to vote for your candidate 3 times. I hope they have a mechanism in place that prohibits that from happening.

It would probably invalidate your ballot.

I'm not certain of the details for this particular ballot, but the normal definition of instant runoff voting works like this:

In round one, the first choices are counted. The last-place candidate is eliminated. The ballots of those who picked that candidate are redistributed based on the second choice.

The process is repeated until a candidate gets over 50%. Each ballot is either counted once, or discarded if all of the choices on it have been eliminated.

This looks like a hybrid of that system, where they eliminate all but two candidates in the first round. I would suspect that each ballot still only can count once at most, and they don't just add all three columns together as the article implies. For example, if your first choice is eliminated, and your second and third choices are the top two, I would guess that your vote goes to the second choice.

This site doesn't specify exactly that, but it does state that picking the same candidate for all choices doesn't help them.


[edit: what gvidas said]