10th CD VA GOP Fans

Recently, there’s been headway in adopting Ranked-Choice Voting, used by several states in the 2020 US Democratic presidential primaries and to be adopted by New York City in 2021.

For all its virtues, Ranked Choice Voting contains a number of risks, largely due to tactical voting and democratic illegitimacy.

Blog Article

Thank goodness for federalism.

New York City, that paragon of clean and fair politics, decided to tinker with its voting system and implement ranked-choice voting for its mayoral-primary elections this year. Some advocate ranked-choice voting for more elections. The waiting period we are in right now is the best argument for why ranked-choice voting should stay right where it is.

National Review Article

It appeals to progressives because it allows them to vote twice—once for show and once for real.

When it comes to counting votes, America’s political parties want to keep or gain their own advantage. The public interest, however, demands a nonpartisan method. No neutral method has yet been devised that merely elicits the people’s will without twisting it one way or another. Ranked-choice voting is an attempt that has its own twist and will make elections worse for both parties.

Wall Street Journal Opinion

SUMMARY:

You will not believe what “reformers” have devised to tinker with and manipulate our elections. It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections. In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and for preserving our great republic. So-called reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. Ranked choice voting is a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win.
2. It obscures true debates and issue-driven dialogs among candidates and eliminates genuine binary choices between two top-tier candidates.
3. It also disenfranchises voters, because ballots that do not include the two ultimate finalists are cast aside to manufacture a faux majority for the winner.

Heritage Foundation Report

RCV, on the ballot next week in Maine, is far from an adequate fix to our deep-seated electoral woes.

As this merciless presidential election rounds its final bend, it has become commonplace to hear complaints of election rigging from the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. He has urged his supporters to be vigilant. Supposedly there are shenanigans going on at the polls, particularly in areas where lots of Democrats and nonwhite voters live.

Trump is one among millions of Americans unaccountably nervous about voter fraud. But it’s hard not to sympathize with citizens’ deeper anxiety that their votes don’t really count. A recent poll conducted by the Public Religion Institute finds that only 55 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans believe their votes will be tallied accurately. This worry extends beyond mere errors of tabulation, though. Voters say their representatives are “out of touch” with them and too greatly influenced by special-interest money. Across the country, Americans pine for nonpartisan redistricting; voters believe gerrymandering has also diluted their voice.

Left-leaning Democracy Journal Argument

A group of Progressive Burlington city councilors wants to resurrect ranked-choice voting, a controversial election method that Queen City voters repealed nearly a decade ago.

Progressive Burlington Independent

Several friends are collecting signatures to put Instant-runoff Voting, branded as Ranked Choice Voting, on the ballot in Massachusetts (Ballotpedia, full text). I'm glad that an attempt to try a different voting method is getting traction, but I'm frustrated that they've chosen IRV. While every voting method has downsides, IRV is substantially worse than some other decent options.

Personal Blog

Instant-Runoff Voting is a voting method where voters rank candidates, who are then eliminated in a series of simulated runoff elections. It’s also known as “Ranked-Choice Voting” in the US, “Preferential Voting” in Australia, and “The Alternative Vote” in the UK (though there are many other preferential/ranked-choice voting systems, so I’ll use “IRV” here to avoid confusion).

It’s the most commonly-proposed reform in the US (the only reform that many have heard of, in fact), with the promise that it will eliminate the spoiler effect, promote consensus candidates, etc. Unfortunately, these claims are exaggerated, and IRV doesn’t really fix these problems. In this article, I’ll illustrate one of its worst failure modes.

Medium Article

This op-ed was originally published by the Washington Examiner on November 16, 2021.

In January, the Alaska Supreme Court will hear its first appeal against Ballot Measure 2, which instituted ranked-choice voting in Alaska by a margin of half a percent . Trading “one person, one vote” for elections that foster confusion, lower voter turnout, and disenfranchise voters is a bad deal.

If the results of New York City’s first ranked-choice voting mayoral primary are any indication, ranked-choice voting is a disastrous voting method, and there’s no reason why it would be any different in Alaska. The court ought to strike it down before the 2022 elections.

Ranked-choice voting asks voters to rank candidates from most to least favored. If no candidate receives at least 50% of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. All first-preference votes for that candidate are disregarded. Then, for those ballots that listed the eliminated candidate as a first preference, the second choice candidates are counted. The least popular candidates are repeatedly eliminated until one candidate has received a majority of the remaining votes.

Confused yet?

Alaskan Policy Forum

A Case Study of Maine and Analysis of 96 Other Jurisdictions

Introduction
A movement currently sparking interest across the country, including in Alaska, is called ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant run-off voting (IRV). Several U.S. municipalities have experimented with ranked-choice voting for more than a decade. For example, the City of San Francisco, California has been using ranked-choice voting since 2004.[1] Via a 2016 ballot initiative, Maine launched a bold experiment by becoming the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting statewide. This case study has been created using data previously compiled by the Maine Policy Institute from those municipal elections and Maine. The results analyzed are from 96 elections in the U.S. that triggered ranked-choice voting. Put differently, these election results were compiled from 96 races where more than one round of tabulation occurred.

Using this data, we can examine and draw conclusions about ranked-choice voting and compare Maine’s most recent experience with other jurisdictions to identify patterns. The goal of this report is to analyze the history, claims, and mechanisms of ranked-choice voting in an attempt to understand how the system works, its merits and shortcomings, and how it compares to plurality elections and other voting systems.

[1] “Ranked Choice Voting in US Elections.” FairVote. Accessed July 23, 2019.

Alaskan Policy Forum Full Report

In 2018, Maine became the first state to use the alternative voting method ranked choice voting1 (RCV) in federal elections. That’s good because it meant that Maine stopped using our ubiquitous choose-one voting method—largely regarded as the worst single-winner voting method there is.

Keep in mind, however, that the current bar we’re pushing past—our choose-one voting method—is an especially low bar. That voting method breaks at the slightest hint of competition beyond a second candidate.

It’s important as well to not oversell the benefits of ranked-choice voting which many outlets are doing. Overselling RCV can create unrealistic expectations and sour voters to other alternative voting methods. And some of those alternative voting methods aren’t just simpler than RCV. They’re flat-out better.

Center for Election Science