Most people have never heard of ranked choice voting before. It’s a system in which voters rank candidates before an election. If no candidate gets 50% according to voters’ first choices, then the voters’ second choice is taken into account to decide the winner.

For example, pretend one candidate receives 42% of the vote, another gets 41%, and a third candidate gets the rest. No candidate reaches 50%+1 needed to win the election outright. In many states, the top two candidates would go to a runoff election in which voters could clearly choose between the two. But, ranked choice voting has a different process. In those systems, the third candidate’s votes are thrown out, and their votes are redistributed for the voters’ second-choice preferences.