Secretary of State Mac Warner recently released an op-ed taking a stance against ranked choice voting. Which is fine — except that he made some misleading claims.
For our part, we’re going to give an overview of what ranked choice voting is and how it works. For more details, there are several great resources to learn more about ranked choice voting (often shortened to RCV) that you can explore on your own.
Ranked choice voting is what it sounds like: You rank candidates running for office in order of most preferred to least. Say Mickey Mouse, Snoopy and Scooby-Doo are running for president. With RCV, you list them on your ballot from top choice to last choice (e.g., First: Snoopy; second: Mickey; third: Scooby).
Votes are counted in a series of rounds. Everyone’s top choice is counted for Round 1. If a single candidate wins the majority of votes, then that candidate wins the election. If no candidate gets the majority, counting moves to Round 2 and the candidate who received the fewest top-choice votes gets dropped. This is why RCV is sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting: The rankings allow for an immediate runoff instead of setting up a separate election (which costs extra) — like when Georgia had to hold a subsequent vote to decide between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker because neither earned more than 50% of votes.
In our example, say Snoopy got 42% of the vote, Mickey got 38% and Scooby got 20%. For Round 2, Scooby gets dropped from the race and now only votes for Mickey and Snoopy get counted.
But wait! What if Scooby was your first choice? Then your second-choice candidate becomes your first choice, and your vote is counted toward them. What if Scooby was your second choice? Doesn’t matter — your first-choice candidate is still in the race, and that’s where your vote went.
The rounds will continue until one candidate reaches a majority. Each time someone’s top choice is eliminated from the race, their second (or third or fourth) choice will be moved up to first choice, and that is where their vote will go.
It can sound complicated at first, especially since we are used to a system that generally only has two viable options. And it can seem skewed if the candidate who had the most top-choice votes in Round 1 (e.g., Snoop at 42%) ultimately loses. However …
In our example, voters who listed Scooby first, Mickey second and Snoopy third get their votes counted toward Mickey in Round 2, ultimately giving Mickey the win. But that means more voters agreed Mickey would be a better president than Scooby than people who thought Snoopy would be better than Mickey. In this way, RCV is more representative of the people’s will.
This is also why RCV tends to favor more moderate candidates. A more extreme candidate may initially receive the most votes with as little as 30% or 40%, but once less popular candidates are eliminated and second and third choices are taken into account, moderates have a tendency to rise to the top.
Notice how our example has three candidates, all with a decent number of votes? RCV allows for more choice, giving third-party candidates a better shot and letting voters do more than simply pick the “lesser of two evils.” This takes some power away from the rigid two-party system.
One of the biggest “cons” of RCV are “exhausted” ballots: ballots with fewer candidates listed than candidates in the race. Once all of that voter’s choices have been eliminated, that ballot became exhausted — there are no more eligible candidates for the vote to count toward. However, an RCV ballot can go through multiple rounds before being exhausted. So that exhausted ballot counts way more than a throwaway vote for a third-party or write-in candidate does in our current system.
We understand why some politicians dislike RCV: It challenges the status quo, favors moderates, levels the playing field among candidates and — above all — gives more power to voters.
