High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Preferential voting (or preference voting or ranked voting) is a type of ballot structure used in several electoral systems in which voters rank candidates in order of relative preference. For example, the voter may select their first choice as '1', their second preference a '2', and so on. This contrasts with ballots used by methods which do not allow more than two-valued ranking of candidates (Yes or No; Yes to one and No to the others), such as plurality voting or approval voting.