Exhausted ballot: Difference between revisions
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What does it mean that some ballot Choices / Rankings are Discarded / Exhausted (never considered in the final tally)?
=Opponent of RCV=
A ballot becomes exhausted when a voter:
* Exhausted Choices: a voter can list their preferences such that when applied to a runoff round it is for a candidate who is already eliminated - the vote is taken out of the election
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If at any point the voter did not rank a next choice (assuming her most favored choice or choices are eliminated), or all of the choices on the voter's ballot have been eliminated, the ballot is “exhausted” d meaning that it is excluded from future vote redistributions, and it does not affect the final outcome of the election. The ballot, in essence, is discarded. The process ends once a candidate receives a majority of the remaining valid votes.
=Proponents of RCV=
RCV Links
https://www.rcv123.org/ranked-choice-voting-pros-cons#con8
Con: RCV has a problem with inactive/exhausted ballots
These occur when all the choices a voter has marked are eventually eliminated and their ballot has no active choices remaining. We should note that because of inactive ballots, the "majority" 50% in RCV can refer to a majority of active ballots, and not necessarily to 50% of the original number of ballots cast.
We believe RCV works best when voters complete all of the available ranks and communicate their complete priorities. But voting is voluntary in the United States, and if a voter does not wish to make a rank, they are free not to - even if that means denying themselves a chance to make their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. choice known and possibly decisive in an election.
A voter may not wish to provide any support to candidates whose policies they strongly object to - even when that support is only relevant once all of the candidates that voter prefers have been eliminated from the race. We disagree that an inactive ballot is necessarily a sign of a voter not understanding how to take advantage of all that RCV has to offer. If a local election is about an incumbent doing a good job or not, some voters might be highly invested in the incumbent, and may not have strong feelings about any of the challengers.
It's important to explain that not all RCV jurisdictions allow a rank for every candidate. Minneapolis, for example, often has 15 or more candidates for Mayor, but allows voters to mark only their 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices. New York City's Democratic mayoral primary in 2021 had 13 candidates but allowed voters only five ranks. So RCV elections in these locations are certain to have a higher proportion of inactive ballots compared to places where the RCV ballot offers a rank for every candidate. They are completely valid uses of RCV.
It's true that an exhausted ballot no longer makes a difference in an election. However, it's important to point out that the same thing also happens quite often in conventional elections.
Imagine three candidates in a conventional election. The polls closed at 7 pm and the first precincts reporting show the race with two candidates at 40% each, and one candidate is way behind with just 20%. The counting for the 40%/40% race will probably go long into the night, and the voters who supported the 20% candidate realize their candidate can't win, and their vote is not relevant to the ongoing count. Whatever criticisms there are for exhausted or inactive RCV ballots, they should also be applied to the situation for conventional plurality elections we just described. In any race with more than two candidates, not every vote can matter right up until the finish line.
The percentage of inactive/exhausted ballots can depend on how close an election is, how many candidates compete, and how many rounds of counting are necessary for a winner to be declared. An example of a high number of inactive ballots is the very large and competitive 2014 race for Oakland, CA Mayor. Sixteen candidates competed, and it took all 16 possible rounds of counting for a winner to be declared. After three rounds of counting, the number of inactive ballots was 0.01%. By round 10, they reached about 1%, 7% in round 14, 14% in round 15, and then jumped to 24% in the final and 16th round of counting. It was in that final round the incumbent mayor was eliminated, and it seems only half of her large number of (possibly overconfident) supporters filled in a 2nd rank.
A more typical situation is the 2018 election for Mayor of San Francisco. Nine candidates competed, and the election required nine rounds of counting. After five rounds of counting, just 0.01% of ballots had become inactive/exhausted. After the final and 9th round, 8.4 % of the original set of ballots had run out of ranks.
On one hand, exhausted, inactive ballots are a fact of RCV.
But there is another side to that coin: RCV is designed to be as inclusive as possible in how it incorporates 2nd, 3rd, 4th choices, etc. of the supporters of defeated candidates.
On balance, we believe RCV is much, much, more inclusive of voter preferences than it is exclusive.
==what are inactive or “exhausted” ballots?==
https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting-information/#_13-what-are-inactive-or-exhausted-ballots
An inactive or exhausted ballot counts for candidates in the first round but not in the final round.
Ballots become inactive for the following reasons:
The voter doesn’t rank all candidates, and all of their ranked candidates are eliminated during the round-by-round count. Also known as voluntary abstention, this is the most common source of inactive votes.
Election administrators limit voters to a certain number of rankings, such as three, and all of their ranked candidates are eliminated during the round-by-round count. This is known as involuntary exhaustion.
The ballot is disqualified due to error, such as giving multiple candidates the same ranking. This is the rarest source of inactive ballots; indeed ballot error rates are consistently low under RCV. See our Data on RCV page to learn more.
=See also=
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