In November, voters in seven states and Washington, D.C. will consider ballot initiatives related to ranked-choice voting (RCV), a completely new way of conducting elections.
If voters in these and numerous other jurisdictions choose to use RCV to run their elections, it could prove disastrous for conservatives, both nationally and in the states where ranked-choice voting is being considered.
What is Ranked-Choice Voting?
In traditional elections, voters typically select one candidate for each office, and then the candidate with the most votes wins. But in ranked-choice voting, elections are turned on their head.
Under RCV, voters are asked to rank all of the candidates for each office, even the ones they don’t like. If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the first-preference vote, that candidate wins. But if no candidate surpasses 50 percent, then voters who chose an unpopular candidate as their first preference are then reassigned to another candidate based on their second, third, or even fourth preference. In effect, these voters get to vote twice or more.
This process goes on until a candidate gets a majority of the vote and is subsequently declared the winner. Under ranked-choice voting, a candidate who receives the most first-preference votes can and often does lose the election.
To better understand ranked-choice voting, consider the following hypothetical situation. Imagine that a state adopts ranked choice voting for its congressional elections. In the next election for a U.S. House seat in the state, three candidates appear on the ballot — a Democrat, a Republican, and an independent.
On Election Day, the Republican receives 47 percent of the first-preference votes. The Democrat gets 43 percent. The independent candidate gets just 10 percent. Because none of the candidates in our hypothetical election surpassed the 50 percent threshold, the voters who selected the independent as their primary choice would be reassigned to the Democrat or Republican, based on their second preference. If those independent voters overwhelmingly choose the Democrat as their second choice, he or she would win, even though the Democrat lost the first-preference round of voting by a wide margin.
The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center reports that as of the 2022 elections, RCV has been adopted in 62 different jurisdictions, including statewide in Alaska and Maine.
RCV’s Biggest Problems
Ranked-choice voting has created numerous problems in the jurisdictions where it has been adopted.
First, ranked-choice ballots confuse many voters, causing them to fill out ballots incorrectly, invalidating them in the process.
Second, RCV models ask voters to rank candidates they don’t like. In some cases, voters who select losing candidates as their first preference but refuse to rank other candidates they don’t like can end up having their ballots thrown out.
Third, as the hypothetical example previously mentioned shows, under RCV, candidates who receive the most first-preference votes often lose. This might seem like a rare occurrence, but there are many instances in which this has happened.
For example, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) notes, “In Maine’s 2018 Second Congressional District election, more than 8,000 ballots were thrown in the trash. Bruce Poliquin (R) received 46.33 percent of the vote ahead of Jared Golden’s (D) 45.58 percent. But since Poliquin didn’t receive 50 percent, there was a second round of tabulation. The secretary of state threw out more than 8,000 ballots and Golden was declared the winner — but with only 49.2 percent of the total ballots cast.”
Fourth, ranked-choice voting is inherently unfair. Voters who select unpopular candidates as their first preference effectively vote again, sometimes multiple times. Why should some voters get numerous votes just because their first preference is wildly unpopular?
Fifth, ranked-choice voting often delays elections, because tabulating the results is substantially more complicated than the vote-counting process under a traditional model. In 2021 in New York City, where ranked-choice voting is now used for some elections, citizens had to wait nearly a month for the results of the mayoral Democratic primary. Even worse, more than 140,000 ballots were thrown in the trash because voters did not properly rank candidates.
A Left-Wing Scheme
Ranked choice voting has garnered support from some moderate Republicans, but it is most popular among left-wing groups, who have strategically selected jurisdictions to push for the new election system. In many cases, millions of dollars have been poured into jurisdictions by left-leaning organizations and megadonors as part of an effort to shift the political dynamics of a state or region.
According to a 2022 report by Fred Lucas at the Capital Research Center, three of the biggest financial backers of FairVote, one of the nation’s most prominent organizations advocating for ranked-choice voting, are the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation, and Soros Fund Charitable Foundation.
In November, ballot initiatives related to ranked choice will be considered by voters in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington DC. In Alaska, ranked-choice voting is already in place, but conservatives have managed to get an initiative on the ballot to eliminate it.
Another set of ballot initiatives in Montana, CI-126 and CI-127, are designed to pressure lawmakers into adopting RCV in a future legislative session, but they wouldn’t create RCV on their own.
In these and many other jurisdictions, RCV supporters target anti-establishment voters, including many conservatives. They claim that ranked-choice voting is an ideal system for them because they can vote for any candidate as their first preference, even if they know they are going to lose, without worrying about throwing away their vote.
In reality, ranked-choice voting is a scheme that makes it harder for independent candidates to win and is regularly being used by left-wing groups to undermine conservative candidates.
For example, in states with RCV systems and large Republican populations, such as Alaska, liberals vote for a Democrat as their first preference and then choose the most liberal Republican they can find as their second preference. If a conservative Republican fails to surpass the 50 percent mark in the election, the less popular “moderate” Republican wins with a coalition of Democrats and a minority moderate Republican voter base. Conservatives end up left out in the cold.
For instance, in Alaska’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, RINO Republican Lisa Murkowski received just 43.4 percent of the total vote in the first round of ranked-choice balloting. The two other Republicans in the race received a combined total of 45.9 percent of votes.
However, after Democrats’ votes were reassigned in the RCV’s final stage of balloting, Murkowski ended up winning the race with 53.7 percent of the vote. Most of Murkowski’s additional votes came from voters who first favored the race’s Democratic candidate.
With these results in mind, it’s not a surprise that Murkowski supporters and out-of-state liberal groups were some of the biggest forces behind the movement to adopt RCV in Alaska back in 2020, when the state first adopted the radical change.
Liberals rarely, if ever, push for ranked choice voting in jurisdictions where it would help conservatives gain political power, even though they sell the idea as nonpartisan.
Ranked-choice voting might sound like an interesting idea at first, but the closer one examines RCV, the uglier it looks.
One person, one vote. It’s worked for Americans for generations. There’s no good reason to change things now.
Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is the director of the Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute and a New York Times bestselling author.
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