Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My co-host this week, as always, is Cleveland Area Attorney and sometime Republican strategist Jay Carson.

In this episode of Ask the Politics, guys, we're going to answer a couple of election-related questions we've gotten from listeners in recent weeks. Okay, first is a question

from Alex, from Sandy, Utah. I should also mention that Alex is one of our great monthly

contributing supporters, and we really appreciate that. Okay. Thank you, Alex. Yep. Thank you very

much, Alex. Okay, here's Alex's question. Do you think that rank choice voting is a system that would

work on the federal level? Is it something that the nation should consider using universally?

And what are the pros and cons? And finally, do you believe it would help break us out of our

two-party system? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing? So there's a lot, I think, great questions in there.

But I wanted to start off with just a brief explanation for listeners about what rank choice voting is before we get into that, Jay.

So that's, so rank choice voting is sometimes called instant runoff voting. And here's how it works.

Voters will rank their top picks, often from one to five, though it doesn't have to be five necessarily.

Now, if one candidate gets a majority, then there's your winner.

But if no candidate gets an outright majority, the candidate picked first by the fewest people is eliminated

with the eliminated candidate's votes going to the candidates those people picked second.

So it continues that way until one candidate actually does have the majority.

So let me give you an example.

If you were, say, a particularly liberal voter in 2016, you might have ranked Jill Stein first,

Hillary Clinton second, Gary Johnson third, and Donald Trump last. Well, when Jill Stein was eliminated

in the first round, which he would have been, your vote then would have gone to Hillary Clinton.

So that's more or less what ranked choice voting is and how it works.

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