Paste the ballots — one person per line, options in order of preference — and this runs an instant-runoff count: each round the option in last place is eliminated and its ballots transfer to their next surviving choice, until one option holds a majority. Every round is shown. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Separate each ballot's options with >, a comma, or a tab. Names are matched case-insensitively. A ballot may rank as many or as few options as the voter wants — when all of a ballot's ranked options are eliminated it is set aside as exhausted.
Ranked-choice voting (RCV), also called instant-runoff voting (IRV), lets each voter rank the options instead of picking just one. Counting happens in rounds. In each round every ballot counts for its highest-ranked option that is still in the race. If one option has more than half of the active votes, it wins. If not, the option in last place is eliminated and each of its ballots moves to that voter's next choice. The rounds repeat until something crosses a majority.
Twelve people pick a team lunch. On first preferences Pizza leads with 5 votes, but that's short of the 7 needed for a majority — Tacos has 4 and Sushi 3. Sushi is eliminated, and because most Sushi voters put Tacos second, Tacos climbs to 7 and wins. A plain plurality vote would have handed it to Pizza, even though a majority preferred Tacos once Sushi was out. Load the example above to watch both rounds.
Plurality (first-past-the-post) counts only first choices, so a candidate opposed by most voters can still win by splitting the opposition. Instant-runoff keeps transferring votes until a winner has majority support among the ballots that still express a preference, which is why cities and organizations adopt it for single-winner elections.
Instant-runoff cares chiefly about first preferences and who survives each elimination. The Borda count instead scores every position on every ballot at once, so it rewards a broadly-liked compromise even if it is few voters' outright favorite. They can crown different winners — running both on the same ballots is the quickest way to see whether your result depends on the method. Want each person to submit their own ranking instead of pasting? Create a shared rankit poll — one link, no signup.
Do ballots have to rank every option? No. Rank as few as you like; when all of a ballot's options are gone it becomes exhausted and stops counting toward the majority total.
Is this the same as a runoff election? It's the instant version: instead of holding a second election, the lower-ranked preferences already on each ballot act as the runoff, all in one count.
Is anything sent to a server? No. The whole count runs in your browser, so you can paste real ballots safely.