Medium: RCV-ing the Democratic Primary

We ran an experiment to see how “ranked-choice voting” would work on the current field of Democratic candidates for President. I’m not sure we’ve done it correctly, but I wanted to describe what we’ve done here, and make the data available to others.

RCV gives voters the chance to rank their preferences in an election. If the first ranked candidate doesn’t meet the threshold, then their second vote is counted. If that candidate doesn’t meet the threshold either, then their third is counted. And so forth. The objective is to avoid “wasted votes” — or better, “wasted voters” (not in that sense) — meaning a voter whose preferences disappear from the election, because their candidate does not come even close to winning.