Elections & Polls
Each candidate's percentage is their votes divided by the total votes cast, times 100.
Raw vote counts don’t tell you much on their own. This vote percentage calculator turns a simple list of candidates and vote totals into percentages, a declared winner, majority status, and how close the race actually was.
Once you enter each candidate’s raw vote count, the calculator adds them together to get the total votes cast, then divides each candidate’s votes by that total to get their percentage share. From there it identifies the candidate with the highest percentage as the winner, checks whether that share passes 50% for a majority, and calculates the gap between first and second place as the victory margin.
| Output | What it means |
|---|---|
| Winner | The candidate with the highest percentage of total votes. |
| Majority (>50%) | Whether the winner earned more than half of all votes cast, rather than just the most votes in a multi-candidate field. |
| Margin | The percentage-point gap between the winner and the runner-up, a common way to describe how close a race was. |
| Total votes | The sum of every candidate’s votes entered. |
In a race with three or more candidates, it’s common for the winner to have the most votes without clearing 50%. The calculator flags this distinction directly: a majority means over half of all votes went to one candidate, while a plurality just means they had more votes than any single opponent. Watching the Majority field is the fastest way to tell which situation you’re looking at.
A margin expressed in percentage points is easier to compare across races with very different total vote counts than a raw vote difference is. A 500-vote gap means something very different in a race with 1,000 total votes versus one with 100,000, but a margin like “13.5 points” is comparable either way.
One candidate per line, in the format Name: Votes, such as “Bob: 3100”. The calculator reads each line as a separate candidate.
Yes. You can enter as many candidates as the race actually had, each on its own line, and the calculator works out percentages, the winner, and majority status across all of them.
It’s the gap, in percentage points, between the winning candidate’s share of the vote and the runner-up’s share. A small margin indicates a close race; a large one indicates a decisive result.
Yes, in any race with three or more candidates splitting the vote. The winner can hold the largest single share (a plurality) without passing 50% of the total, which is exactly what the Majority (>50%) label is checking for.