Frequently Asked Questions

Top 3 + Head-to-Head gives voters real choices of candidates. First, all candidates compete in a primary election open to all registered Ohio voters. The top 3 vote-getters advance to the general election.  The general election may often feature more than one candidate from each of the major parties.

In the general election, voters express a preference in each of the head-to-head comparisons of candidates to select a winner who best and most fairly reflects the voters’ choices.

Once all ballots have been cast, candidates are compared in head-to-head matchups, in a manner similar to a round-robin sports tournament. Head-to-Head Voting asks:

• If it were just Ann vs. Bob, who would win?

• If it were just Carol vs. Ann who would win?

• If it were just Carol vs. Bob who would win?

The voter’s ballots are used to determine the winner of each head-to-head matchup.

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To determine the winner of the general election, compare each pair of candidates by counting the number of voters who prefer one over the other. The candidate preferred by more voters in a given head-to-head matchup wins that matchup. We call the candidate who wins all head-to-head matchups the Consensus Choice because they represent an acceptable compromise between different voters’ preferences.

In almost all large-scale elections, the process of comparing candidates head-to-head will identify the Consensus Choice, a single candidate who wins all their head-to-head matchups.

In the extremely rare case that every candidate loses to another candidate, the winner is determined as follows:

If no candidate beats every other candidate in head-to-head matchups, the winner is the candidate who lost by the smallest amount.

If two or more candidates are still tied after that, the winner is chosen by lot, according to Ohio election law.

Let’s start with three statistics:

• 24% of Ohio voters say they are satisfied with the way democracy is working

• 13% of Ohio voters say they trust the state government in Columbus to do the right thing always or most of the time

• 8% of Ohio voters say they trust the federal government to do the right thing always or most of the time

Democracy works when people believe government is legitimate, leaders are accountable, and communities see themselves in who governs. Many Americans from all sides of politics do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. They think both major parties are not listening to and dealing with the problems of everyday people. Our current system of “pick one” plurality elections can produce leaders who do not have the support of a majority of voters. It incentivizes candidates to campaign against each other using toxic tactics, deepens partisan divides and undermines the ability of government to function.

Top 3 + Head-to-Head is an election system innovation that creates real competition so the parties and candidates have to listen to and work for everyday people. It also makes it harder for party insiders, activists, or special interest groups to control who wins.

No!

Ohio is proposing an open primary election, without party restrictions, to select the Top Three candidates for the general election. In the general election, voters directly express their preferences among those candidates in head-to-head matchups. The votes are counted through pairwise comparisons, and the winner is the candidate who defeats each of the other candidates head-to-head.

Head-to-Head Voting preserves the simplicity of pick-one voting in the qualifying stage, while ensuring the winner of the general election is the candidate that best and most fairly reflects the voters’ choices. It also anticipates Ohio administrative realities by explicitly tying ballot layout to county boards of elections and state directives, and tying verification to Ohio’s post-election audit framework.

Short answer: nope!

But selecting your preferred candidate in each head-to-head matchup gives you more say in who wins and represents you.

Unlike “pick one”, voters can express their preferences honestly for the candidates they like most AND still have a say about the ones they like least.

• More Choices, Fewer Wasted Votes – You don’t have to vote “strategically” or worry about spoilers.

• Better Leaders – Politicians can’t just pander to their base; they have to win broad support.

• Less Division – Candidates and campaigns will have incentives to focus more on solutions and common ground, instead of fear mongering and division.

No. You already make choices between options everyday—movies, restaurants, job candidates. Head-to-Head Voting works the same way. Instead of picking just one candidate, you get a say about every candidate running for office.

The counting process is conducted by teams of professional public servants who run elections. When ballots are counted, they ensure the election rules are followed and that the elected candidate accurately reflects the collective preferences of the voters.

Yes, Top 3 + Head-to-Head Voting aligns with constitutional principles and the original vision of the Founding Fathers. In “The Real Preference of Voters”, legal scholar and Better Choices Advisory Board member Edward B. Foley shows that James Madison, one of the primary architects of the U.S. Constitution, recognized the value of a voting system based on the fairness principles of Head-to-Head Voting. Madison wrote about an electoral structure that would reflect “the real preference of the voters,” ensuring that the most broadly supported candidate would win.

Foley argues that adopting a system based on the principle of finding the Consensus Choice would strengthen Madisonian democracy by preventing the rise of authoritarian demagogues who manipulate partisan primaries and win elections despite lacking broad public support. By ensuring that election outcomes truly reflect the will of the electorate, Top 3 + Head-to-Head would reinforce core democratic principles such as political equality and majority rule, making it both constitutional and necessary to protect representative democracy.

No.  In fact, our current system is what gives some voters more power than others – in many gerrymandered districts and non-swing states, some voters barely matter at all. That’s why a vast majority of 2024 races for Congress and state legislatures were decided by low-turnout or meaningless primary elections.

Top 3 + Head-to-Head fixes that by making sure that every voter’s preference carries the same weight in deciding the winner. No individual person’s vote is more important than anyone else’s.

Partisan Primaries and Plurality-Winner 

While election systems vary by state and even local jurisdictions in the United States, many states and jurisdictions use a system of partisan primaries followed by plurality-winner general elections. Under this system, representation is awarded exclusively to the candidates receiving the highest number of votes, irrespective of the margin or proportion of overall support. At first glance, such a system is straightforward: each voter casts a ballot, and candidates with the most votes win the election. The electorate generally expects the winning candidate to align with the beliefs, values and policy preferences of the largest voting bloc in the candidate’s constituency. 

However, partisan primaries followed by plurality-winner general elections are particularly susceptible to partisan extremism. They can also lead to unfair results that further drive the toxic politics rampant in our country. In closely contested elections where there are only two candidates, the voters represented by the losing candidate (which could be up to half the electorate) could have no effective representation. And, candidates can even win an election without receiving the majority of the vote, as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton did. 

Such systems can lead to elections where voters don’t really have a choice, and the outcomes are essentially predetermined. Candidates have minimal incentive to engage in cross-party coalition-building or outreach to opposing voter groups, often leading to contentious political environments where it’s difficult to productively solve problems and govern. In elections with districts that lean in one partisan direction, candidates only have to appeal to their partisan base to win. Take for example, a 60/40 district, where 60% of voters align with one party and 40% with another. The predominant use of primary elections and a plurality general election create an incentive for candidates to focus on appealing to the 60% to win, even if it means ignoring or denigrating the 40%. In this case, the only real competition happens in the primary election.

Instant Runoff Voting

Under Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), voters rank candidates in order of preference. Initially, only first-choice votes are counted. If no candidate has a majority (>50%), the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and votes for that candidate are transferred to the voters’ next-ranked candidates. This process repeats until one candidate receives a majority of the remaining votes.

IRV also fails to ensure that all votes are equally powerful, does not always elect the true majority winner, and voters may have to adjust their choices to impact results.

Voter influence is also unequal. IRV does NOT satisfy Preferential Equality because some voters’ preferences impact the outcome more than others. A voter whose first-choice candidate is eliminated early may have their later rankings counted, while a voter whose candidate survives longer has fewer of their rankings considered. This results in unequal influence depending on how votes transfer.

IRV can also encourage tactical voting because it provides incentives for voters to adjust their rankings, especially in elections with three or more viable candidates. Voters often must rank a compromise choice higher than they prefer to avoid their least-preferred candidate winning.

IRV can also fail to elect a true majority winner because it uses elimination rounds. It does not always select the candidate that would win head-to-head against every other candidate. It can eliminate a broadly acceptable candidate early simply because they didn’t get enough first-choice votes, even if they would have beaten all other candidates in direct matchups.

Because IRV eliminates candidates sequentially, in some cases, a small group of voters ranking strategically can determine which candidates survive and which are eliminated early. This could swing an election drastically, propelling a less popular candidate to victory over one who would have won in a true head-to-head majority contest.

Head-to-Head Voting

Voters directly express a preference in each head-to-head matchup of candidates in the general election. There are no elimination rounds and no black box algorithms to determine a winner. Candidates compete on a fair playing field against all of the other candidates on the ballot. Every head-to-head contest among candidates is worth as much as every other. Results are clear and verifiable.

Benefits of Top 3 + Head-to-Head:

• More choice on the ballot.

• Top Three establishes fairness for the 71% of Ohioans who are registered as unaffiliated voters and currently do not get a say in who will be the candidates on their ballot in November.

• Every voter gets an equal say in every head-to-head matchup.

• Head-to-head matchups treat candidates equally: each matchup is worth the same, so all candidates compete on a level playing field.

• Head-to-head matchups incentivize different kinds of candidates to run and changes how they campaign, encouraging bridge-building and discouraging tactics that ignore large blocs of voters.

• Transparent counting mechanisms with clear and verifiable results.

• Results known in a similar timeline to current vote counting, no delays that could occur with other voting methods).

• Mitigates risks of spoilers.

Top 3 + Head-to-Head preserves the simplicity of pick-one voting in the qualifying stage, while ensuring the winner of the general election is the candidate that best and most fairly reflects the voters’ choices. It also anticipates Ohio administrative realities by explicitly tying ballot layout to county boards of elections and state directives, and tying verification to Ohio’s post-election audit framework.

Right now, politicians win by dividing us—stirring up their base while ignoring or attacking everyone else.

Top 3 + Head-to-Head changes the rules of the game to incentivize candidates and campaigns to appeal to a wider audience. To win, they can’t just fire up their most loyal supporters—candidates have to reach out to multiple majorities of voters in order to win pairwise matchups against other candidates. This makes it harder for extreme candidates to succeed.

No, complete unanimity is an unrealistic standard of determining an election winner. A more realistic standard is given by what social choice theorists call a Condorcet winner, a candidate who defeats every other candidate head-to-head. As Elkind et al. write, “[A] Condorcet winner, when one exists, presents an acceptable compromise between different voters’ preferences. We say that an election is a consensus election if it has a Condorcet winner.” In this spirit, we call the Condorcet winner the Consensus Choice.

Yes—and that’s a good thing. Right now, parties have the power to pick the candidates and voters can only say “yes” or “no.” This incentivizes the parties to find candidates who will gin up their base or donors, even if most voters don’t actually like the candidates.

With Top 3 + Head-to-Head, the parties will have to recruit candidates who can win broad support, meaning more practical, solution-oriented leaders. It also makes room for independent and third-party candidates to compete without “spoiling” elections.