Which voting method should your group actually use?

Ranked choice voting, also called instant runoff, asks each person to order every option from favorite to least favorite. The lowest-scoring option is eliminated round by round, and its voters' next choices get redistributed, until one option holds a majority. Approval voting asks a simpler question: which of these would you genuinely accept. Everyone checks as many or as few options as they like, and the option checked by the most people wins outright, no rounds involved. STAR voting, short for Score Then Automatic Runoff, asks people to rate every option from 0 to 5 stars, averages the scores, then runs one head-to-head runoff between the two highest-rated options using those same ratings. Each method is answering a genuinely different question, which is exactly why they can land on different winners from identical opinions.

Say a group of seven friends is picking dinner from four options: pizza, sushi, tacos, and burgers. Three friends rank pizza first, three rank sushi first, and one ranks burgers first. Nobody puts tacos first, but here is the twist: every single friend ranks tacos second or third. Tacos is nobody's favorite and nobody's enemy. That setup is common in real groups: a strong front-runner or two, plus a compromise option nobody loves but nobody hates. Watch what each method does with it.

Round one: pizza has 3 first-choice votes, sushi has 3, burgers has 1, tacos has 0. Nobody has a majority of 4, so the lowest option is eliminated. Tacos has zero first-choice votes, so it drops out first, even though every voter ranked it second. Its ballots have nowhere to go since nobody had it first. Next, burgers, with 1 vote, is eliminated, and that single voter's next choice was tacos, already gone, so their vote transfers to their third choice: pizza. Pizza now has 4 of 7, a majority, and wins. Run it in Votably's ranked choice decision type and the live results view walks through exactly these rounds automatically.

Now the same seven friends vote approval-style: check every option you would be happy with. Pizza gets checked by 4 people, sushi by 4, burgers by 1, and tacos, the option nobody ranked first, gets checked by all 7. Tacos wins outright, unanimously. This is approval voting's signature move: it rewards the option nearly everyone can live with over the option a slim majority loves, because it never forces anyone to rank their compromise pick below their favorite. Run the same group through Votably's approval decision type and the broadest-support option surfaces immediately, with no elimination rounds needed.

Rate all four options 0 to 5 and average the scores: tacos comes out highest, since it collects solid 3s and 4s from everyone, while pizza and sushi each pick up some 0s from friends who ranked them last. Plain average-score voting would crown tacos again. STAR voting adds one more step: take the top two by average score, pizza and tacos, and run an automatic runoff using each person's own ratings for just those two. Counted that way, the four friends who rated pizza higher than tacos outnumber the three who rated tacos higher, and pizza wins the runoff. So in this example, plain score picks the same winner as approval, while STAR's extra runoff step swings it back to pizza. Votably's score decision type supports both plain scoring and STAR mode, so you can see both answers from the same set of ratings.

Ranked choice and STAR's runoff both reward an option with strong first-preference or high-rating support once weaker options are stripped away, which is why they agree on pizza here. Approval and plain score both reward broad acceptability, which is why they agree on tacos. Neither answer is wrong. They are measuring different things: intensity of preference among a majority, versus how widely acceptable an option is to everyone. A group deciding on a restaurant might genuinely want the crowd-pleaser, tacos, over the option a bare majority feels strongly about.

Pick approval when you want a fast, low-drama decision and are fine with a simple checkbox: work lunches, quick either-or calls, anything where a compromise everyone accepts beats a favorite half the group loves. Pick ranked choice when people have real, ordered preferences and you want the eventual majority winner to reflect that ordering: picking a restaurant for a big group, choosing among several trip destinations. Pick score or STAR when the options deserve nuance beyond a checkbox, such as comparing a shortlist of finalists where intensity of preference matters as much as direction. All three are free to run in Votably, so when a group cannot agree which method is fair, try two and compare.