Bucklin voting

Okay, kiddo! Bucklin voting is a way of voting that helps us choose a winner when there are many options to choose from. Here's how it works:

Let's say we have 5 candidates running for class president: Sarah, Jake, Amanda, Michael, and Zoe. Everyone who is voting gets to choose their favorite candidate, and we count up how many votes each person gets.

But with Bucklin voting, we also look at everyone's second and third choices. So if someone votes for Sarah as their first choice and Jake as their second choice, we write that down.

Then we start counting the first choice votes. If someone gets over half of the first choice votes, they win! But if no one gets over half, we move on to the second choice votes. We add up the votes for each candidate that didn't get knocked out in round one.

We keep going like this until someone gets over half the total votes. The idea is that if enough people have the same second or third choice, that person could still win even if they didn't get the most first choice votes.

So with Bucklin voting, you get to express your preferences for multiple candidates, and we can choose a winner based on more than just the first choice votes. Cool, huh?