Ranked-choice voting (RCV)

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is an electoral system in which voters rank candidates by order of preference on their ballots. Candidates must receive a majority of the votes—50 percent plus one—to be declared the winner. If no candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated from the contest. All first-preference votes for the failed candidate are excluded, but the second-preference choices indicated on those ballots are counted. Another vote tally is done to determine whether any candidate has won a majority of the adjusted votes. The process continues until one candidate is the majority winner.

RCV—which is sometimes referred to as instant-runoff voting—is viewed as an alternative to plurality voting, in which the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes. In the United States, numerous cities—including New York City; San Francisco; and Portland, Maine—use RCV to determine municipality elections. As of 2024, three states—Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii—have likewise adopted RCV. Internationally, countries such as Australia and Papua New Guinea use this style of voting to elect members of parliament, and Ireland employs the system to determine its president.

Background

RCV dates to mid-nineteenth century Europe. It was devised as a proportional representation system in elections with multiple winners. It was used in Denmark on a trial basis and was adopted in Australia for legislative elections in the 1850s. William Ware, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), adapted RCV for use in single-winner or instant-runoff races in the 1870s. The Australian House of Representatives adopted this form in 1918. The Australian Senate adopted the multi-winner format of RCV in 1948. Other countries, including Malta and the Republic of Ireland, also adopted RCV in the twentieth century.

The first place in the United States to adopt the system, Ashtabula, Ohio, began using it in 1915 for city council races. It was subsequently adopted in cities such as Boulder, Colorado, and Sacramento, California. The cities adopted a multi-winner proportional system of RCV, which guarantees minority representation. In 1936, New York City adopted it for city council and school board races.

Even as cities across the United States adopted RCV over the next decades, many people who opposed it succeeded in having it repealed. Among those who campaigned against it were politicians who lost elections and political parties that opposed those elected. Although twenty-four US cities had adopted RCV, by 1962 only Cambridge, Massachusetts, still used the system. The tide began to turn in the twenty-first century in the United States. In addition to Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii, multiple cities adopted RCV during that period. At the same time, ten states had passed legislation banning the use of RCV in all elections by 2024.

Overview

Proponents of RCV point to several reasons that it should replace plurality voting. They say RCV makes primary elections unnecessary and eliminates runoff elections that result from having no candidate with a majority of the vote. Eliminating these elections could provide significant savings for state and local governments.

Proponents believe RCV could make campaigns more civil. They point to a Rutgers University poll of seven cities with RCV, which found that voters reported campaigns were friendlier. RCV could also promote fair representation and avoid vote-splitting and weak plurality results. For example, in some races a third candidate can siphon off some votes from the other candidates, but RCV enables voters’ range of preferences to be represented in the results. RCV could also resolve the issue of ensuring military and overseas voters can participate fully, which is a concern when a runoff election must take place. International mail takes time to deliver and receive, but runoff elections must be completed within a specific window.

RCV opponents say that a new election format could make people reluctant to vote. Citizens would need to be educated about how RCV works, and those who do not understand it could vote incorrectly. Another potential downfall to RCV is that producing and counting the ballots will cost more, although eliminating a primary would produce savings. Another concern that opponents have is that if voters do not choose second, third, etc. candidates, no candidate could be determined the winner.

The 2016 US presidential election can be used to illustrate how RCV works. Four sets of candidates were on the ballot: Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Libertarians Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, and Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. In twelve states, neither Clinton nor Trump got at least 51 percent of the votes. Under the plurality system, the candidate with the most votes in a state wins that state. If all fifty states had used an RCV system, voters would have been asked for second, third, and fourth choices. In this scenario, a voter for Stein would have the option of ranking their subsequent choices. The instant-runoff results would then have been calculated automatically.

Many critics of the plurality system say it does not always reflect the will of voters. Experts point to the 2000 presidential election as an example of how vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions can cause a candidate who is less popular overall to be elected. More than 2.8 million voters who leaned left cast their vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000. In Florida, Nader had 97,488 votes (1.63 percent), while Democrat Al Gore had 2,912,253 (48.84 percent) and George W. Bush, the Republican, had 2,912,790 votes (48.85 percent). Experts say many Nader supporters viewed Gore as their second-choice candidate. Because neither Bush nor Gore had a majority, an RCV format could have handed the election to Gore.

Alaska voted for RCV in 2020 and used the system for the first time in 2022 in a special election to complete the term of a Republican. The state’s single US House seat was viewed as reliably red. Alaska held an all-party primary in June, with nearly fifty candidates on the ballot. The top four vote-getters advanced to the August election. Democrat Mary Peltola, who came in fourth in the primary, beat Republican Sarah Palin in the general election. Palin fell about five thousand votes short after Republican Nick Begich III was eliminated and his supporters’ second-choice votes were redistributed. Peltola, Palin, and Begich all qualified for the November election for the full two-year term, with Peltola ultimately winning reelection.

Following the 2022 election in Alaska, many supporters of the RCV system sought to expand its implementation in the lower forty-eight, while those that opposed it argued that it was needlessly complex and muddled the clarity of the election process. Despite the controversy, multiple locales throughout the United States began the process of potentially implementing RCV, with Nevada voters approving a measure in 2022 that, if approved in the 2024 election, would implement RCV for state and federal elections (the presidential election process in Nevada would remain unchanged). Hawaii likewise approved the use of RCV for certain local and federal elections in 2022, and the system was used beginning in 2023.

Bibliography

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Clyde, Don. “Nevada Voters Back Big Changes to Their Election System.” NPR, 13 Nov. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/11/13/1136342255/nevada-election-open-primary-ranked-choice-voting. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.

Donovan, Todd. Changing How America Votes. Roman & Littlefield, 2018.

Heuvel, Katrina vanden. “Ranked-Choice Voting Is Already Changing Politics for the Better.” Washington Post, 4 May 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/04/ranked-choice-voting-is-already-changing-politics-better/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2022.

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Kambhampaty, Anna Purna. “New York City Voters Just Adopted Ranked-Choice Voting in Elections. Here's How It Works.” Time, 6 Nov. 2019, www.time.com/5718941/ranked-choice-voting/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2022.

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Rosen, Yereth. “Alaska's Ranked Choice Voting System Is Praised and Criticized.” Alaska Beacon, ICT, 20 Sept. 2023, ictnews.org/news/alaskas-ranked-choice-voting-system-is-praised-and-criticized. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.