Ranked Choice Including Pairwise Elimination: Difference between revisions

'''Ranked Choice Including Pairwise Elimination''' (abbreviated as '''RCIPE''' which is pronounced "recipe") is an election vote-counting method that uses ranked ballots and eliminates '''pairwise losing candidates''' (elimination-round-specific [[Condorcet loser criterion|Condorcet losers]]) when they occur, and otherwise eliminates the candidate who currently has the fewestsmallest top-choice countscount.

If an elimination round does not have a Condorcet loser, the candidate who has the fewestsmallest top-choice countscount is eliminated. A candidate's top-choice count is the count of how many ballots rank that candidate highest compared to the other remaining candidates.

The last candidate to be eliminated is the runner-up candidate. If this counting method is used in the primary election of a major political party, and if the runoff or "general" election is counted in a way that is not vulnerable to vote splitting, then ideally the runner-up candidate would move to the runoff or general election along with the primary-election winner. SmallVery small political parties would not qualify to move their runner-up candidate to the runoff or general election.

To avoid spoiled ballots in elections where the voter uses a pen or marker to mark their paper ballot, more than one candidate can be marked at the same ranking level. When an elimination round involves a ballot that has two or more remaining highest-ranked candidates, thethat ballot's single vote is split equally among these candidates. This splitting of a single vote can be done using fractions or decimal numbers that do not exceed a total of one vote per ballot. If a law does not permit the use of fractions or decimal numbers, the ballots that have the same shared ranking can be distributed uniformly among the same-ranked candidates, such as alternating which candidate gets each successive ballot on which the same two candidates are highest-ranked at the same level. Regardless of which method is used, each elimination round re-calculates which ballots support which candidates.

IfThe thechoice of how to handle a ballot on which a voter does not mark any ovals for a candidate depends on how write-in candidates are handled. If write-in candidates are not allowed, thatan unmarked candidate iscan be ranked at the ranking level ''below'' the lowest ranking level, asshown ifon the voterballot. markedIf thewrite-in ovalcandidates forare allowed, an unmarked candidate can be ranked ''at'' the lowest ranking level shown on the ballot, and that level also would be used for a write-in candidate whose name does not appear on that ballot.

If two or more candidates have the same smallest top-choice count, this tie is resolved by eliminating the candidate with the largest pairwise opposition count, which is determined by counting on each ballot the number of not-yet-eliminated tied candidates who are ranked above that candidate, and adding thosethese numbers across all the ballots.

If there is also a tie for the smallest pairwise support count, then those candidates are tied and another tie-breaking method is needed to identify which of the still-tied candidates to eliminate.