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Ranked-choice counting: when candidates tie

In ranked-choice voting the weakest candidate is dropped each round and their ballots move to the next choice still in the race. Trouble starts when two candidates tie for last place. This page applies the draft rules in docs/ranked-choice.md to ballots you choose or type, and shows every step. An advisory vote can honestly report a split. An election must produce one winner, so it continues down the tie-break cascade.

Choose the ballots

Kind of decision Advisory vote: if a tie matters, publish the result as tied Election to an office: if a tie matters, settle it with look-back, head-to-head, then a random draw

A preset loads its ballots and counts them straight away. Examples 2 and 4 are the ones where the two kinds of decision give different answers, so try both.

Ballot groups, one per line

Write a count, a colon, then the ranking with the first choice first, separated by > signs. For example, 20: C > B means 20 ballots rank C first and B second. Partial rankings are fine. Names use up to 12 letters or digits. Up to 8 candidates.

Random seed (used only if an election reaches the random draw)

Result

Pick an example or type ballots, then count them.

Illustrative model, not a prediction. It applies the draft rules in docs/ranked-choice.md (proposal v0.1) to ballot counts that you type or choose; it does not model how people vote. It does not cover multi-seat elections, ballot privacy, or the cryptography that would be needed to publish only aggregate counts (open question 5 in the proposal). The random draw uses a seed so a result can be repeated; the proposal calls for public randomness committed before the count, which is not modeled here. The ballot counts in the examples are illustrative. Every rule on this page is a proposal, and CIP is not live.