Special Cases

In every voting system there are rules to handle special cases such as incomplete or incorrectly completed ballots.  The counting rules for Instant Runoff Voting generally try to minimize the effects of people trying to skew the election by voting in certain ways.  The rules complicate the details of counting ballots by hand for special cases, but it’s no problem for computers.  Here are a few examples of rules that the city council might adopt to handle special cases:

• For a ballot to be valid, the voter must rank only one candidate as the highest choice.  If a ballot gives equal rank to two or more candidates, the ballot is declared “exhausted” during the runoff round where duplicate rankings are reached, and it is set aside and not counted in any remaining runoff rounds.  
• If a voter casts a ranked-choice ballot but skips a rank, the vote will be counted for that voter's next ranked choice.
• If all of the candidates chosen on that ballot have been elected or defeated or there are no more candidates indicated on the ballot, then the ballot is deemed "exhausted" and not counted in any remaining runoff rounds. This is the equivalent of voting in the primary election but skipping the general election!

Luckily, these are things that voters don't really need to worry about!

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