The Primary election will be on June 24th, and voters will be able to rank their top five candidates for office. It’s important to understand the basic principles behind how ranked choice voting works and why it’s important to vote for more than your first choice.
If in the first round, no candidate gets more than 50%, then we go into the second round, where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from contention, their second-ranked choice is redistributed to the remaining candidates in the race. This process of elimination and redistribution continues until a candidate hits the greater than 50% threshold.
You can use RCV strategically to prevent candidates you dislike from winning by ranking a second, third, fourth, and fifth choice. Without making additional choices, you allow other voters’ second, third, etc., choices to weigh more heavily than yours.
Therefore, ranking multiple candidates doesn’t hurt your first choice, and helps prevent other candidates that you definitely do not want from winning.