You’ve probably seen mentions of “ranked choice voting” on Facebook or X, but perhaps in the context that it is a George Soros plot to crush Republicans’ electoral chances or a silver-bullet fix for all that divides Americans. RCV is neither. But it is the fastest-growing nonpartisan prescription for reforming election procedures in the country. The number of voters participating in ranked choice elections has more than doubled in five years. So it’s time to brush away the slogans to see what RCV is really about and where it could take us.

Just The Facts, Please

Ranked choice voting gives voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference – and to have those rankings affect election outcomes. It works its magic, of course, only on races with more than two candidates, which might otherwise be won by a candidate who, on balance, a majority of voters oppose. In an RCV election, voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they like from first to last preference, but ranking multiple candidates does not harm the chances of a voter’s first choice.

Right now, voters in10 states and many cities use familiar two-round runoff elections to identify majority winners in races with more than two candidates. RCV is a faster and cheaper means to achieve the same end. But the benefits are more than speed and cost. RCV allows voters whose favorite is a long shot to influence the final choice by choosing second (and even third or fourth) favorites.

Don’t underestimate the benefits of another key difference: voters in RCV elections don’t have to make a second trip to the polls to make their wishes felt. This avoids not only the expense of a runoff but also the dramatic decrease in voter turnout that almost always ensues.

Here’s how an RCV race works. First, it’s an election-as-usual in which each ballot counts for the voter’s preferred candidate. If one candidate gains a majority of first choices, they win – as they would with any other election. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked the eliminated candidate number one now have their ballot count for their next-highest-ranked candidate. In the second count, if any candidate has a majority of votes, they win. If not, the remaining candidate with the fewest votes is once again eliminated and another elimination round occurs using the ranked choices.

About half the time, additional rounds aren’t needed because one candidate gets a majority on first choices alone. The other half requires the instant runoff to determine the winner.

While RCV and delayed runoffs achieve many of the same goals, RCV prevents the aforementioned precipitous drop in voter turnout (typically a 40 percent decline) and saves money for governments – an estimated $20 million per election cycle in New York and hundreds of thousands of dollars for cities in Utah.

RCV, by the way, is currently used in Alaska and Maine, as well as in some 50 cities and counties around the country. Actually, the U.S. is late to the game. RCV has been used elsewhere – notably, for national elections in Ireland and Australia – for over 100 years.

RCV And Reform

There is a growing acknowledgement that our politics is deeply, dangerously divided. Voters are dissatisfied by their seeming lack of influence, elected officials are frustrated by their inability to get things done, and partisanship in Congress prevents compromise. In many cases where polls show Americans do agree on policy solutions, our leaders are nonetheless unable to find common ground.

Keep in mind that RCV is a structural reform – it won’t in itself reduce disagreement about hot-button issues ranging from abortion to immigration to universal medical insurance. But I would argue that the failure to find compromises is a direct result of the electoral systems we have in place, and the political incentives they create for candidates and officeholders.

Campaigns seem too negative? One reason is that our single-choice voting system encourages candidates to accentuate differences with opponents both in primaries and general elections with more than two candidates because they understand they can win with only a minority base of support. Elected officials fail to take action on policies with broad popular support? That’s because they can’t afford to. Or don’t need to: they could end up losing a primary to an opponent with very strong views or getting crushed in a three-way election.

Ranked choice voting would make all elected officials more accountable to the voters because RCV elections must be won with a majority. It follows that it leads to progress on issues that are currently stalled by gridlock or by perverse electoral incentives that effectively give candidates with less than a majority of support a veto over change. For example, RCV rewards candidates who can make a case to be the second or third choice of some voters and thus encourages civil behavior in campaigns.

It forces candidates to reach beyond their base and talk to more voters – and sometimes even encourages candidates in the same race to campaign together. In New York, two candidates for a city council seat endorsed each other as second choices, emphasizing areas of policy agreement.

In Virginia, ranked choice voting was used to choose Glenn Youngkin in the Republican primaries.

The Dread Spoiler Effect

Voters are often introduced to RCV as a solution to the “spoiler effect.” Whether it’s Ross Perot in 1992, Ralph Nader in 2000, Jill Stein or Gary Johnson in 2016, or Robert Kennedy Jr. in 2024, Americans are all too familiar with the idea that each additional candidate who enters a race increases the risk of splitting the vote in close races and electing a government that lacks the support of the majority of the electorate.

RCV, by contrast, gives would-be third-party voters a voice without creating this risk. Right now, voting for a candidate we truly want to win could run counter to our own interests by helping elect the candidate we like least. So, in every election cycle across every level of government, tens of millions of Americans vote strategically for the candidate who somewhat aligns with their values and who they presume has the best chance of winning. When polling is unreliable or does not exist at all, this single-choice guesswork is akin to voting by throwing darts blindfolded.

The spoiler effect punishes voters who want their general dissatisfaction with two-party politics-as-usual known by supporting third-party candidates in general elections. By the same token, it discourages long-shot candidates from jumping into primary elections, and also pressures women and potential candidates of color to “wait their turn” rather than take on entrenched incumbents. This last phenomenon results in politicians who don’t reflect the diversity of the voters they hope to represent. And it’s one reason why Congress provides a home to a much larger share of older white men than the U.S. population as a whole.

Diversity And Civility

As touched on above, in “choose-one” elections, revving up a narrow base – as little as 20 or 30 percent of eligible voters – can be a winning strategy. In 2020, 120 congressional primary elections resulted in a nominee without majority support from within their own party primary. Republicans in particular struggled with non-majority nominees who went on to lose competitive general elections, notably Senate candidates Mehmet Oz (Pennsylvania) and Blake Masters (Arizona).

But with ranked choice voting, voters can lend their support to multiple candidates, and candidates can’t win without the support of a majority. This rewards candidates who refrain from negative campaigning to avoid alienating voters who are on the fence, and who engage in more civil discourse reflecting their areas of common ground with their opponents. Research by Eamon McGinn of the University of Technology Sydney found that this change in incentives has real-world impacts on the tone of political discourse, even in competitive elections.

Candidates will sometimes share a “yard sign anecdote” when discussing what it’s like to run in a ranked choice contest. In traditional elections, a candidate who sees an opponent’s yard sign on a voter’s lawn will simply skip that door when canvassing. With RCV multi-candidate elections, a candidate still has an incentive to knock on that door and make their case to be that voter’s second choice. The evidence demonstrates that RCV winners have a much higher degree of consensus from voters – some 73 percent of RCV ballots rank the winning candidate among their top three choices.

It’s also worth repeating that RCV has played a part in opening the door for more candidates of color and LGBTQ+ and women candidates to run because they need not fear they will be spoilers. For example, New York City elected its first majority-female city council the first time it used ranked choice voting. Salt Lake City elected its first majority-minority and majority-LGBTQ+ city council using ranked choice voting, and Minneapolis elected its first majority-minority city council under the system.

Better Primaries

A key growth area for RCV over the past five years has been within party primaries, a decision made by pragmatic party leaders to increase the probability of choosing candidates with broader appeal in the general election. The Republican Party of Virginia has used RCV for statewide nominations, including to nominate now-governor Glenn Youngkin, and for several congressional primary nominees. Other state parties also used RCV in 2020 or 2021 conventions in order to replicate the outcome of the round-by-round nominating process without having to gather in person during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Four Democratic state parties used RCV in 2020, with at least four states on the Democratic side and the U.S. Virgin Islands on the GOP side opting in for 2024. It’s worth noting, moreover, that in the states that did not use RCV for the 2020 Democratic primaries, three million voters cast their ballots for presidential candidates who had already dropped out, with the biggest impact on early and mail-in voters. In the RCV states, those voters had their vote count for their second or third choices.

What Voters Think

Exit poll data find that voters who have used RCV say they understand and prefer it, even after using it only once. Additionally, analysis of a national database of election returns reveals that across some 600 RCV elections held in the U.S. since 2004, 71 percent of voters did use the option to rank multiple candidates on their ballots. Voters who support candidates who aren’t considered front-runners are even more likely to rank, indicating an understanding of how RCV can work to their advantage.

Who Wins, Who Loses?

RCV rewards candidates who have a strong base of support, but it can also reach beyond their base. RCV has elected independent-minded and centrist Republicans and Democrats who may have otherwise been ousted in party primaries.

The best example is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who barely led the Senate race in 2022 (with less than 50 percent of the total vote among first choices) but won with a strong mandate due to her strength as a second choice. In Maine in 2020, centrist Republican Susan Collins won a majority on the first ballot in spite of facing both a Democrat and an independent candidate from the left; though the race did not go to RCV tabulation, Collins and the Democratic nominee still had incentives to appeal for the second-choice preferences of those who voted for the independent. The common theme with these two campaigns is that the candidates had strong incentives to speak to issues important to the majority of voters.

By the same token, RCV creates a more difficult path for divisive candidates because they are less likely to win support beyond their narrow base. Sarah Palin had a committed base of support but could not attract more moderate Republicans and independents, and thus lost two consecutive RCV races.

In Palin’s first RCV race, a special election to fill a partial term for Alaska’s one congressional seat in 2022, she got 31 percent of first-choice preferences, trailing Democrat Mary Peltola, who earned 40 percent. When the third-place candidate, Republican Nick Begich, was eliminated, one might have expected to see his voters largely transfer to Palin. However, Palin had actively discouraged voters from using their right to declare a second choice. Peltola, for her part, ran a more positive campaign that spoke to Alaskan issues like fisheries and gun rights, and many Begich voters rewarded her by ranking her second.

Sarah Palin talking her way out of a win.

Opposition To RCV

The use of RCV has taken off since San Francisco adopted it for municipal elections in 2004. By 2010, RCV had spread to four other localities. And today, some 13 million voters are in voting districts with RCV. But pushback has set in, with the opposition focusing on three issues.

First, opponents argue that RCV is too complicated for voters to understand. The health of democracy depends on broad participation, and voters need to feel empowered to cast a vote and understand how it will be counted. This critique tends to build on concerns that our elections can already be exclusionary thanks to a combination of bureaucracy and various strategies of voter suppression. Adding complexity, they claim, could further demoralize the electorate.

In fact, voters who use RCV report that they understand it and like it. In some ways, after all, elections with multiple candidates can be even more complicated. When facing a crowded field, voters often must make strategic decisions to ensure they’re voting for a candidate who can win and not throwing away their ballots. RCV lets voters cast a ballot that reflects their honest preferences, without the gamesmanship. Strikingly, voters of color seem to embrace RCV by typically ranking more candidates on their ballots than white voters.

Second, RCV challenges the status quo in some ways, so there can be some expected opposition from incumbent officials – and incumbent political parties. In fact, both Republicans and Democrats have embraced ranked choice voting in party primaries where it can be used to weed out candidates with little general appeal. But they are reluctant in situations where RCV conceivably works to their parochial disadvantage. Arlington, Virginia, is a good example. The Arlington County Board adopted RCV for party primaries in 2023. But when faced with the question of whether to expand RCV to apply to general elections, county board members punted.

Third, there appears to be growing opposition to RCV from conservatives. Both before and after Sarah Palin’s loss in Alaska, she denounced the system as “crazy, cockamamie, convoluted.” Some conservative voices, like the Florida-based, hard-right Foundation for Government Accountability and the Honest Elections Project, began working to limit RCV. RCV also earned the scorn of Donald Trump in 2022.

The most plausible rational explanation for this opposition is that very conservative organizations believe they have the best chance of winning inside the GOP with a small plurality in a multi-candidate field. They may be right, but the stance against RCV is short-sighted for Republicans in the sense that its adoption would give conservatives incentives to sell their ideas to a broader portion of the electorate and perhaps help to stabilize the Republicans as a center-right party that could accept compromise.

Indeed, some sophisticated voices on the right, reflecting on the initially crowded presidential primary field, made exactly that case. They pointed out how RCV could help the party build general support through the primaries, and traditional conservative organizations including the R Street Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute offer cases for embracing RCV. Republicans have lost numerous close House and Senate seats over the past decade when right-populists won primaries but never gained necessary support from independents in the general election – think Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire, 2016), Joe Heck (Nevada, 2016) and Ed Gillespie (Virginia, 2014).

What’s Next?

RCV is likely to continue growing in part due to its popularity with voters who have used it, because it offers structural fixes for an election system viewed to be in some disarray. Cities and towns have been at the forefront of RCV’s growth so far. It’s been adopted in blue, red and purple cities, from our nation’s largest metropolis to small towns of only a few hundred voters. Indeed, three cities in Michigan (Kalamazoo, East Lansing and Royal Oak) voted to adopt RCV in the November election. But what put it on the agenda in some cities, while the idea is ignored in others?

First, cities with two-round municipal elections have much to gain (apart from serving democracy). New York and Salt Lake City have already halved the cost of their elections by replacing their delayed runoffs with RCV. Other cities plagued by the problems of run-offs, including Chicago and Denver, could also save money, allowing voters to choose their mayors and city councilors in a single election when turnout is highest and the field is widest.

Second, cities with the ability to write and amend their own charters without approval from their state legislatures have a straight-forward path to adopting RCV. Utah, Colorado and Virginia have already passed enabling legislation making it easier to pilot RCV.

Third, cities with RCV-compatible voting equipment have an easier path to adoption. Voting machines made in the past decade-and-a-half are capable of facilitating RCV elections. Cities using older machines may need to upgrade before they can adopt it. But these cities likely have upgrades planned within the next five to 10 years for other reasons, so pursuing RCV in those locations could be tied to the technology upgrades.

Of course, hand-counting is also possible with RCV. However, a machine count in an RCV contest is instantaneous – it takes milliseconds longer than a machine tabulation of a single-choice contest. And unlike a hand count, it is not subject to human error.

At least two states will vote whether to adopt RCV in 2024. Oregon will decide for statewide and federal elections, including for president. Nevada will vote on a constitutional amendment that would combine non-partisan primaries with ranked choice voting, similar to the system that Alaska already uses. Several other states and territories have active campaigns that could lead to ballot measures in 2024, including Washington, DC, and Idaho.

RCV interest among state legislators is on the rise. In fact, the Oregon measure was referred to the ballot by the legislature, which expressed support for the idea but also wanted the popular legitimacy conferred by a ballot referendum. Pro-RCV legislation has also passed in Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont over the past two years.

The big question is whether a Congress that reflexively divides on virtually every issue could create a bipartisan path to RCV. Donald Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, and he called RCV “ranked choice crap voting” and “a total rigged deal” before Sarah Palin’s contest in 2022. But Trump’s campaign is also one of several that has registered for the U.S. Virgin Islands presidential primary, which will use RCV.

So looking down the road, there may be some daylight. In 2021 the House, then controlled by Democrats, passed pro-RCV provisions as part of two larger bills, but neither was taken up by the Senate. Leaders from both parties have previously supported ranked choice voting, including bipartisan dealmakers Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney.

Ideally, Congress would mandate RCV for federal elections – what the sponsors of the Ranked Choice Voting Act had in mind. More likely, it will encourage adoption by providing assistance to states that opted for RCV – as offered by the Voter Choice Act. Support from Washington is often a lagging indicator of support around the country. But now that RCV is moving out of the “thought experiment” phase – and maybe there’ll be an election or two in which Republicans decide that RCV could have helped them – it is likely to win more support on the Hill.

An Offer We Shouldn’t Refuse

There are myriad ways to improve the election process, if improvement is defined as making it easier for the public to express its will. But many of them – everything from automatic registration at the DMV to holding elections on weekends to direct popular voting for president – are currently nonstarters because they are widely seen as favoring Democrats. Ranked choice voting stands out because its impact would be truly nonpartisan.

RCV is hardly the fix for all that ails the democratic process in America. But 20 years of RCV elections show that it does reward candidates for connecting with a broader swath of the electorate and gives more voters confidence that their choices matter. What’s not to like?