Voters in four states and the District of Columbia will have a chance to adopt ranked choice voting through ballot measures on Tuesday, setting the stage for a potentially massive expansion of an alternative voting system in which voters rank candidates rather than only picking their top choice.
On Tuesday, voters in Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and D.C. will choose whether to adopt the system. The dominant political parties in each location have fought against the adoption of ranked choice voting, which is already used in Alaska, Maine and a handful of municipalities around the country, including New York City and San Francisco.
In ranked choice, voters indicate who would be their first choice, second choice, third choice and so on down the ballot. If no one gets a majority of first-place votes, the votes are retabulated: The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and the second-choice votes of that eliminated candidate are added to the remaining candidates’ tallies. This goes on until a candidate gets a majority of votes.
It’s been hyped as a way to avoid extremism and to allow voters more than a binary choice between a bad candidate and a worse one. But it’s also controversial.
This year, Alaska is holding a vote on whether to repeal ranked choice voting, which it first used for statewide elections in 2022. And in Missouri, language to prohibit ranked choice voting is part of a proposed constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the GOP-dominated state legislature.
And there is some research saying a few of the proposed benefits of ranked choice voting, such as better quality of candidates and more diverse candidates, has been oversold.
A 2024 study by a New York University data science assistant professor Jonathan Colner, found only a temporary effect in the 47 cities in 13 states where ranked choice is used for local elections.
“Though there is an initial increase in the number of candidates following RCV implementation, this effect quickly dissipates. Furthermore, the candidates who make up this initial increase are generally of low quality,” he wrote.
The change also did little to diversify the mix of candidates in terms of race or gender, he said.
“Instead, RCV appears to disrupt the local political environment, stimulating temporary increases in candidate entry before becoming part of the status quo.”
Deb Otis, the research and policy director at FairVote, a nonprofit which supports ranked choice voting, disagreed.
“The elevator pitch is that ranked choice voting gives voters better choices, better campaigns and majority winners,” instead of the win going to someone with only a plurality of votes, she said.
It also keeps independent candidates from being seen purely as spoilers for major-party rivals.
“When you have a third-party or an independent candidate running, voters get told that that candidate might be a spoiler, or they might be wasting their vote if they’re not voting for a frontrunner,” she said.
“It puts voters in a really challenging position, and it causes political parties to do really strange things, like boosting independent or third-party candidates from the other side to try to help their own side.”
Despite the seeming complexity ranked choice adds to voting, Otis said voters are used to ranking things, just not candidates.
“I have a list of my favorite foods, and if the item I want is sold out, I will order my second choice. I won’t go home hungry. I know what my second choice is,” she said.
It’s not that simple, though, according to ranked choice voting’s critics.
The issue has split Colorado’s Senate delegation. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), despite sponsoring a bill to make ranked choice voting easier for state and local governmentsto implement, has come out against Proposition 131, the RCV referendum in the state. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, are in favor.
“I have said that ranked choice voting in some form, and in some elections, could have a beneficial effect. But, ranked choice voting is new and comes in many forms. I am unconvinced that the largely untested, extreme version we have been asked to consider will work in Colorado — or anywhere else,” Bennet said in a statement.
Bennet also said RCV could increase the reach of big donors, citing the campaign for Prop 131.
“We have been battered by a one-sided barrage of millions of dollars of TV advertisements to persuade us to abandon our current, world-class election system for an untested experiment,” he said.
The proposition would create an open primary system, where the top four candidates in a conventional vote would advance to the general election regardless of party. Voters would then rank those remaining four names.
Colorado has turned increasingly Democratic over the last 20 years. But the state’s Republican Party does not see ranked choice voting as a tool to help it break that hold, and is also urging voters to reject the change. The state GOP said it would help elect liberal Democrats and is being pushed by people “whose goal is to eliminate parties and move to a centrist system.”
A Democratic operative familiar with the state’s politics told HuffPost the proposition has rare bipartisan opposition, as the state Democratic Party is also opposed to it.
“Look, the Colorado Republican Party is nutso,” the operative said. “But they wouldn’t say that we need to turn our system on its head just because they can’t get their shit together.”
In D.C., where voter registration is overwhelmingly in the Democrats’ favor, the local Democratic Party is also opposed to a ranked choice vote initiative. D.C.’s initiative would also allow independents to vote in either party’s taxpayer-funded primaries, which is not currently allowed.
“Allowing non-Democrats a voice in Democratic elections will cause our Party’s values and goals to be diluted. Rank Choice Voting and Semi-Closed Primaries may compromise the integrity of our party, potentially leading to nominees who do not fully align with our core values,” the party said on its website.
FairVote’s Otis said RCV can actually make parties more competitive by allowing less ideological candidates to emerge. She pointed to Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, who was selected the nominee in an RCV primary.
“The party put forward the most competitive ticket that they’ve had in years, and went on to win the governorship” in a Democratic state, she said.
The concerns about big money and its role in boosting ranked choice voting may be harder to answer.
Of the two big campaign committees fighting over Prop 131, the pro-RCV group has vastly outspent its opposition counterpart —$14.3 million to only $284,540 through mid-October, according to state campaign finance data.
In fact, in the waning days of October, Kent Thiry, a former CEO of dialysis giant DaVita, was reported to have given $1.45 million to the “yes” campaign, in two separate donations. Thiry has pushed previous election changes in the state and is part of a larger group of individuals who have spent more than $50 million on the RCV efforts in Colorado and the other states, according to a Colorado Public Radio analysis.
Curtis Hubbard, a Democratic political consultant and spokesman for the pro-131 campaign, said the almost 213,000 signatures gathered to put RCV on the ballot, as well as the ideological diversity of the elected politicians who support it, showed it is in fact broadly popular.
“We’ve built a broad and diverse coalition from across the political spectrum in Colorado who are interested in giving voters more and better choices,” Hubbard said.
