Bucklin election system - a different way to use ranked votes - and not a very good one.

Ranked votes can be used for different purposes.

In addition to STV's ranking as backup preferences, as weights in some systems and in rated systems, there is at least one other way to use rankings - although no longer used and generally despised - Bucklin voting.

I think it should be mentioned if only as way to show that even electoral reform has had its dead ends, and to give reader an idea of why ranked votes are dealt with as back-up preferences in STV.

In Bucklin voting, if no one fills the seats in the first round of counting, secondary preferences are then counted in combination with first preferences. In this system lower preferences are used against first preferences and both are counted at the same weight. This system is not used anywhere today.

This different system, which used ranked but non-transferable votes, came into brief use in Grand Junction, Colorado, where its inventor, James W. Bucklin, lived, and in Cleveland, Denver, San Francisco and several other U.S. cities

Cleveland's use of Bucklin voting produced instances where a voter's secondary preferences were used and were weighted as highly as the voter's first preference, so voters learned to plump (mark only one preference) to prevent their secondary preferences being used against their first preference. Cleveland switched to STV in 1923.

By 1940s, almost all the U.S. cities that had adopted STV had abandoned it.

(see "STV a progressive cause"

https://electoral-reform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/A-short-history-of-STV-in-the-USA.pdf accessed 2026-06-16)

Bucklin presented his system in his 1911 book The Grand Junction Plan of City Government and Its Results.

available online at https://archive.org/details/jstor-1011423

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