Preferential voting or preference voting (PV) may refer to different election systems or groups of election systems: * Any

electoral system An electoral or voting system is a set of rules used to determine the results of an election. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, nonprofit organizations and inf ...

that allows a voter to indicate multiple preferences where preferences marked are weighted or used as contingency votes (any system other than

plurality Plurality may refer to: Law and politics * Plurality decision, in a decision by a multi-member court, an opinion held by more judges than any other but not by an overall majority * Plurality (voting), when a candidate or proposition polls more ...

or anti-plurality) *

Ranked voting Ranked voting is any voting system that uses voters' Ordinal utility, rankings of candidates to choose a single winner or multiple winners. More formally, a ranked vote system depends only on voters' total order, order of preference of the cand ...

methods, all election methods that involve ranking candidates in order of preference ( American literature) **

Instant-runoff voting Instant-runoff voting (IRV; ranked-choice voting (RCV), preferential voting, alternative vote) is a single-winner ranked voting election system where Sequential loser method, one or more eliminations are used to simulate Runoff (election), ...

and

single transferable vote The single transferable vote (STV) or proportional-ranked choice voting (P-RCV) is a multi-winner electoral system in which each voter casts a single vote in the form of a ranked ballot. Voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vot ...

, referred to as "preferential voting" in Australia by way of

conflation Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, or opinions into one, often in error. Conflation is defined as 'fusing blending', but is often used colloquially as 'being equal to' - treating two similar but disparate c ...

Bucklin voting Bucklin voting is a class of voting methods that can be used for single-member and multi-member districts. As in highest median rules like the majority judgment, the Bucklin winner will be one of the candidates with the highest median ranking ...

, similarly conflated during the

Progressive Era The Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) was a period in the United States characterized by multiple social and political reform efforts. Reformers during this era, known as progressivism in the United States, Progressives, sought to address iss ...

Optional preferential voting One of the ways in which ranked voting systems vary is whether an individual vote must express a minimum number of preferences to avoid being considered invalid ("spoiled" or "informal" or "rejected"). Possibilities are: * Full preferential vot ...

* 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.

See also