What is Instant-runoff voting?

In the traditional First Past the Post voting, the candidate with the most votes will win the poll. This system can lead to undemocratic outcomes. Imagine the following scenario. The hosts of a party create a poll to decide what to eat, resulting in the following:

• - Icecream   nets 9 votes
• - Gummy Worms   net 10 votes
• - Tacos   net 11 votes
• - Cake   nets 6 votes
• - Pizza   nets 2 votes

Under First Past the Post, despite receiving less than 30% of the vote, Tacos would win the election.

We can see by these results that the majority of the party goers would prefer to eat a dessert, but because their vote was split, the fringe choice of tacos was served at the party.

The party goers could host a runoff election with the top two candidates (Tacos and Gummy Worms), but that still wouldn't be the most democratic way to choose a snack.

A better way would be to host 4 runoff elections, eliminating one candidate at a time. Ordinarily this would be impractical (especially for a small party), but with Instant-runoff voting, the same result can be determined with just one round of voting.

Instead of just picking their favorite candidate, voters rank their candidates in order by preference. When a voter's preferred candidate is eliminated, the poll is simply rerun as if that voter's next choice was what they voted for.

The end result is a much more democratic and fair election, without the hassle of hosting a bunch of runoffs.

How does BetterPoll handle tie-breaking?

BetterPoll uses forwards tie-breaking. In other words, if two or more candidates are tied for last, the one who had the least votes in the first pass will be eliminated. If the tied candidates were also tied in the first round, the loser will be chosen randomly.