Equal Ranking

Most ranked ballots make you put the candidates or options into a strict order. If you feel the same way about two or more options, you have no way to express that. An election on rcv-lab can optionally allow voters to assign several candidates the same rank, and the ballot's weight is shared among them. This page explains why that matters and exactly how the count handles it.

It's an option, off by default — see Enabling Equal Ranking at the end. For where it sits among the other counting rules, see the Election Methods guide.

Why: sorting is easier than ordering

If there are a large number of candidates or options, it is not reasonable to think people can put them in strict priority order. Usually people have a number of bins they can distinguish:

• 1st — the options you actively want
• 2nd — the ones you'd be glad to see win
• 3rd — the ones you could live with
• 4th — the ones you'd rather not

Official ballots already concede the point. Rank caps of three to five are common in real RCV elections, on the reasonable theory that deep rankings aren't dependable. But a cap has a price: with five ranks and twelve candidates you can say something about five of them, and the other seven land in one undifferentiated heap. And if the voter feels the same about certain candidates, they have no way to express it.

Equal rankings remove that trade-off. Instead of putting a large number of candidates in order, you sort them into a few priority levels. That is the real shift: from "put these in order," which people do badly past about the fourth or fifth rank, to "sort these options into a few priority levels," which people do easily and honestly.

How the count handles it

A ballot's weight is split equally among the candidates sharing a rank. Rank two candidates 1st and each receives half a vote; your 2nd-choice level receives nothing yet.

The part that matters is what happens next. As co-ranked candidates are eliminated, their share consolidates onto the co-ranked candidates still standing — it does not skip ahead to your next level. Your ballot only moves down a level when everyone at the current level is out of the race.

An example, counted by this site's engine. Six voters rank Ashwood and Birch equally first and Cedar second; four vote Cedar; one votes Dogwood:

In round 1 the six split ballots give Ashwood 3 and Birch 3 — half a vote each. Dogwood is eliminated first, and that ballot has nowhere to go, so it becomes inactive. In round 2 Ashwood and Birch are tied and the tie-break eliminates Birch. In round 3, Birch's three votes do not move on to Cedar. They consolidate onto Ashwood, who was co-ranked all along — so those six ballots now deliver their full six votes, and Ashwood crosses the threshold.

That answers the question voters actually ask, which is whether splitting a vote weakens it. It doesn't. Those six ballots were worth six votes in every round; the split only decided how the six were distributed while both candidates were still in the race.

Another way to see it: shared, weighted, ranked approval

The same rule stated differently: a ballot is a sequence of approval sets in priority order. The ballot's entire weight goes to the highest-priority set that still has surviving candidates, divided equally among the members of that set. When every candidate in a set has been eliminated, the whole weight moves to the next set down.

At every stage the ballot contributes exactly one vote, held entirely within a single tier. That is the answer to the usual objection to equal rankings — this is the fractional form, not the variant in which a ballot ranking three candidates equally contributes three votes to a round.

With a single rank the system reduces to weighted approval: one vote shared among the approved candidates. That case is available directly as the Approval (split vote) method.

This is not Bucklin. In Bucklin a ballot's lower ranks are added while its higher-ranked candidates are still in the running, so one ballot can support several candidates at once. Here the weight only ever occupies one tier at a time. The same rule carries into STV surplus transfers.

Enabling Equal Ranking

Equal ranking is off unless you ask for it. In the Contest Rules panel, set Equal Ranking of Candidates to "Allowed — votes split equally between them." The voting screens then let voters share a rank; the other two settings treat a shared rank as an overvote — an error — and either skip that rank or stop counting the ballot there, which is what most official RCV jurisdictions do. Leave it off if you are reproducing a real election, and see the methods guide for what each setting does to the count.

Everything else in the app reads co-ranking as genuine indifference. The head-to-head (Condorcet) analysis counts co-ranked candidates as beating everyone you placed below them, and as having no preference between themselves. The Statistics tab measures how much your voters actually used it: the gap between "candidates ranked per ballot" and "rank positions used per ballot" is exactly the co-ranking.