The Threat of Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a political weapon and emerging threat to our democracy. It is a complex, multi-step process that confuses voters, escalates negativity, increases costs, and results in voter suppression.

RCV is already in 28 states. In 2023, NBC reports that legislatures in 14 states are considering expanding or implementing RCV. And Congress has introduced a bill twice before to make RCV mandatory in all 50 states for U.S. House and Senate races. If we don't act now, the entire U.S. election system is about to change.

Preserve Democracy is a non-partisan group dedicated to preserving the fundamentals of our democracy by fighting the spread of RCV and increasing voter turnout. This is key to protecting democratic participation and preserving the will of the constituents.

Groups with extreme partisan agendas have been working for decades to re-engineer our election systems to get certain results. But that’s not government by the people; that’s government by dark money through re-engineered election systems for political gain.

Election systems should not be politicized. Every American should be able to vote, vote once, and have it counted. The process should be easy to understand and accessible to everyone.

That's why Preserve Democracy exists. We are a nonpartisan group led and supported by moderates, Republicans and Democrats. We are devoted to combatting election re-engineering and working to increase voter turnout.

What happens when you combine an all-in or “jungle” primary with ranked-choice voting in the general election? Putting the two modern “innovations” on elections together in Alaska produced this absurd result, in which Republicans lost a House seat despite getting 60% of the vote.

And get ready for it to happen all over again in two months:...

The problem here isn’t cheating — the result is legitimate. It’s the jury-rigged Alaska election system that’s absurd....

First off, Alaska has chosen to use all-in primaries instead of party primaries. Other states have adopted these as well, notably California, but they use those to narrow down the general election to a run-off between the top two vote-getters. Alaska puts the top four finishers on its general-election ballot, but requires a majority to win. Rather than use a subsequent runoff between the top two of the general election, Alaska requires voters to fill out second and third choices between the four candidates … and then goes through a ridiculous process to assign those ranked choices if one candidate doesn’t get 50% — which this system all but guarantees will happen....

And in this case, the party that got 60% of the vote lost to the party that got 40% of the vote....

... Recently, though, two states, two counties, and 58 cities have converted from traditional plurality to ranked-choice systems. Twenty other states are presently evaluating such systems, with the Arizona Senate recently prohibiting RCV....

Under plurality voting, the candidate with the most votes wins. Under RCV, voters must rank the initial slate of candidates in the order of their preference. If no candidate receives a majority of over 50 percent of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates according to the voters’ second-choice preferences. This redistribution process is repeated until one candidate receives a majority of over 50 percent.

Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow’s famous Impossibility Theorem provides that no voting system can simultaneously and consistently meet three essential fairness criteria...

However, RCV has serious issues. First, the most marginal candidates may end up being the winners...

... there’s a deeper problem that’s sufficient reason to reverse the spread of RCV. In the first round, the voter ranks the candidates on the initial slate relative to one another... Critically, in a real runoff, the voter would first see the results of the first round, then would have a chance to re-rank the candidates in the second given these results, and so on. Yet, these adjustments are not allowed under RCV....

Voters will rightly view this system as... unpredictable and, hence, untrustworthy...