Ranked Choice Voting ballots are easy to fill out.
RCVis makes the results easy to understand, too.
Charts, graphs, and tables to help your audience understand the results of a Ranked Choice Voting election. Export to Wikipedia, embed with HTML, or share to social media.
What is Ranked Choice Voting?
RCV elections are just like a standard "first-past-the-post" election, except you can have backup choices. If your top pick gets the fewest votes, they are eliminated and your vote is transferred to your next choice.
Learn more on our medium post: An Illustrated Guide to Ranked Choice Voting.
Types of Visualizations
Bar Charts
The interactive bar chart shows how each round of the election progresses. The number of votes each candidate receives is represented by the size of the bar. As you progress between rounds, the bars grow and shrink to show the change in number of votes that each candidate is receiving.
The colors represent how many votes were gained in each round: for example, the yellow part of the bar shows the votes that were received in the first round.
The colors are perceptually linear, making them colorblind-friendly for all forms of colorblindness, including monochromacy (completely colorblind).
Sankey Diagrams
The sankey diagram shows how the votes flow from one candidate to another as each round progresses. This visualization is best for displaying how the eventual winner received their votes. By exploring where the votes flowed from, you can see candidates who were similar and those who were not.
In this example, you can see that Strawberry and Blackberry were most similar, and when Strawberry was eliminated, most of its votes went to Blackberry. That makes sense, given they are both berries. A real-world example might have a certain political party in place of berries.
Round-by-Round
There are several tabular formats, allowing you to inspect precisely what happened based on what you care about. The tabular-by-round format allows you to inspect the state of votes on a specific round. The tabular-by-candidate format (not shown here) allows you to dive into the number of votes a certain candidate had on each round.
Single Table Summary
The single table summary is a quick, noninteractive view that combines both the tabular-by-round and the tabular-by-candidate views. It gives a quick, at-a-glance summary of each round.
This table can also be exported to Wikipedia with several Wikicode features, including sorting each round by who had the most votes in that round, and including both percentage of votes and number of votes.
While all interactive formats have a noninteractive, print-friendly version, this single table summary is particularly well-suited for print where graphics may be expensive.
Real-World Data
2021 New York City Elections
Single Transferrable Vote (STV), a.k.a. Multi-Winner RCV
Newest Data
Most recent visualizations created by our users
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- TasteResults (10 candidates, 4 rounds)
- These are options for the topic of the 3rd unit of Comm 450. Rank them in order of your preference. (4 candidates, 2 rounds)
- Portland 2015 Mayoral Race (17 candidates, 14 rounds)
- Test CM at large A (7 candidates, 3 rounds)
- What book would you like to read next? (5 candidates, 2 rounds)
More Resources
RankIt Online RCV Polls
rankit.vote
RankIt is FairVote's RCV online polling tool. You can use it to elect a leader in your local student organization, or just ask your friends which movie they'd like to watch next.
RankedVote Online RCV Polls
rankedvote.co
RankedVote is a feature-packed RCV polling tool. The free version allows basic RCV elections and polls, and optional upgrades allow you to run advanced elections with features such as voter registration, voter lists, and duplicate voter detection.
Advocate for RCV
fairvote.org
FairVote is a champion of electoral reform. including adovcating for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, i.e. single-winner RCV) and Single Transferrable Vote (STV, i.e. multi-member RCV). Their gold standard is the Fair Representation Act, which would enact proportional representation in the US.
Implement RCV
rcvresources.org
The RCV Resource Center provides resources and guidance for implementing RCV to everyone, from jurisdictions to individual voters. They played a major role in guiding the development of RCVis.
Tabulate an RCV election
rcvresources.org/rctab
RCTab is a tested and certified software package many RCV tabulation rules implemented. It parses Cast Vote Record files and creates results summary files which RCVis can then visualize.
Future Development
RCVis is free, open-source, and nonpartisan. These are our top projects. If you'd like to help fund the development of RCVis, or volunteer your time as a developer, please get in touch: [email protected].
- Accessibility: RCVis is not screenreader-friendly, though we have an undocumented audio captions for each visualization. We'd like to make these audio captions widely available, as well as making all RCVis visualizations screenreader-friendly.
- ES&S Data: We'd like to be able to upload and visualize data from Election Systems & Software voting machines.
- Election Pages: In addition to hosting visualizations, we'd like to host a list of visualizations, so a jurisdiction can point to a list of all available visualizations for a given election. This has historically been burdensome to smaller, less-resourced municipalities.
- Live Updates: While the API allows you to update an existing visualization, there is no UI for this. Being able to update existing visualizations with newer data would allow the same URL to update as election data rolls in.
- Infrastructure Updates: We'd like to use enable autoscaling to better support the influx of users and uploads on election night, as well as other infrastructure updates for stability and speed.
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