Ballot exhaustion occurs when a voter's ballot can no longer be counted, because all candidates supported on that ballot have been eliminated from an election. This may occur because the voter chooses not to fill out a complete preference ranking,[1] or because the ballot format itself limits the number of preferences that may be expressed.[2][3] This results in "exhausted" or "inactive" ballots.[4]
For example, under the Supplementary vote variant of Contingent vote, voters are limited to expressing their favorite and second favorite candidate. If neither candidate ranked by a voter on their ballot makes it to the runoff round, then that voter's ballot is exhausted and has no effect in the runoff round.
Similarly, the form of contingent vote used in Sri Lanka limits voters to expressing 3 rankings, so if there are more than 3 candidates, their ballots can be exhausted.
Such an outcome can also happen under instant-runoff voting, such as in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The city limits voters to 3 rankings of candidates on ballots for city elections.[5]
References
edit- ^ Burnett, Craig M.; Kogan, Vladimir (2015-03-01). "Ballot (and voter) "exhaustion" under Instant Runoff Voting: An examination of four ranked-choice elections". Electoral Studies. 37: 41–49. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2014.11.006.
If at any point the voter did not rank a next choice … or all of the choices on the voter's ballot have been eliminated, the ballot is "exhausted" meaning that it is excluded from future vote redistributions, and it does not affect the final outcome of the election.
- ^ Kilgour, D. Marc; Grégoire, Jean-Charles; Foley, Angèle M. (2020-07-01). "The prevalence and consequences of ballot truncation in ranked-choice elections". Public Choice. 184 (1–2): 197–218. doi:10.1007/s11127-019-00723-2. ISSN 0048-5829.
Sometimes truncation is forced—voters are allowed to rank only a limited number of candidates—but sometimes it is voluntary.
- ^ "RCV Elections and Runoffs: Exhausted Votes vs Exhausted Voters in the Bay Area". FairVote. 2016-10-19. Retrieved 2024-08-28.
- ^ "Ballot exhaustion". Ballotpedia. Retrieved 2024-08-28.
- ^ Minneapolis, City of. "Ranked choice voting (RCV)". vote.minneapolismn.gov. Retrieved 2024-04-14.
Minneapolis uses RCV in municipal elections. With this type of voting, you can rank up to three candidates for each office.
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