Preferential voting or preference voting (PV) may refer to different election systems or groups of election systems:

• Ranked voting methods, all election methods that involve ranking candidates in order of preference (American literature)
  • Optional preferential voting
  • Instant-runoff voting, referred to as "preferential voting" in Australia and as "ranked choice voting" in United States, is one type of ranked voting method.
    • Contingent vote (the top-two variant of IRV)
  • Single transferable vote (referred to as "preferential voting" in Australia)
  • Positional voting
    • Borda count (the most common form of positional voting)
  • Bucklin voting, which was sometimes known as "preferential voting" when used in the United States
• Open list proportional representation, sometimes known as "preferential voting" in Europe and nations such as Sri Lanka, with preference votes used by the voters to express preference to individual candidates on the party list
• Proportional voting methods