Preferential voting
Election systems
title: "Preferential voting" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["preferential-electoral-systems", "electoral-systems", "proportional-representation-electoral-systems", "instant-runoff-voting"] description: "Election systems" topic_path: "general/preferential-electoral-systems" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Election systems ::
Classifications
- Any electoral system that allows a voter to indicate multiple preferences where preferences marked are weighted or used as contingency votes (any system other than plurality or anti-plurality)
- Ranked voting methods, all election methods that involve ranking candidates in order of preference (American literature)
- Instant-runoff voting and single transferable vote, referred to as "preferential voting" in Australia by way of conflation
- Bucklin voting, similarly conflated during the Progressive Era
- Optional preferential voting
- Open list representation, a form of party-list proportional representation where "preference votes" are used to express preference for individual candidates instead of party lists.
References
References
- Reilly, Benjamin. (July 2004). "The global spread of preferential voting: Australian institutional imperialism?". Australian Journal of Political Science.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::