For my critics who are asking me who’s paying me to be against Ranked Choice Voting, the answer is no one but please send someone willing to cut me a check for taking a position I’ve always held.
I was unable to attend Tuesday’s Irvine City Council meeting as I’m on my board for my neighborhood HOA and our meeting was last night (Literally, its the most basic form of local government). But since RCV was on the docket, here’s a quick fact check that supports my position that it’s a bad idea.
Critics (including election officials, mathematicians, and voters in places that tried it) argue it creates more problems than it solves. Here are the main documented issues:
- Voter confusion and errors skyrocket. RCV ballots are longer and more complex — voters have to rank multiple candidates (sometimes up to 5+). This leads to higher rates of spoiled/overvoted ballots and mistakes. In Alaska’s 2022 election, ~11% of ballots were spoiled (3x the normal rate), with thousands thrown out because people ranked only their favorite and stopped. Studies show error rates are higher in lower-income or lower-education areas. (thehill.com)
- Ballot “exhaustion” discards real votes. If you don’t rank enough candidates (or all of them are eliminated), your ballot is thrown out in later rounds. Exhaustion rates regularly hit 9–27% in real elections. Result: the “winner” often gets a majority only of the remaining ballots — not the original votes cast. In some races, the winner had support from less than half the total voters who showed up. This violates the “majority winner” claim RCV promoters make. (sciencedirect.com)
- Counting is slower, more expensive, and less transparent. Results take days or weeks instead of hours because of multiple elimination rounds. It requires new software, machines, training, and expensive voter-education campaigns. Recounts are a nightmare. Some errors have been discovered months after certification. Transparency suffers because computers do the re-tabulations — hand counts are impractical. (stoprcv.com)
- It violates “one person, one vote” in practice. Votes that rank eliminated candidates get “revived” in later rounds, while exhausted ballots disappear. This can give outsized power to certain voters and creates mathematical paradoxes (non-monotonicity, etc.) where ranking a candidate higher can actually hurt them. Some analyses call it fundamentally unfair. (slcogop.com)
- It can hurt minority and lower-turnout voters. Research shows higher exhaustion rates in districts with higher concentrations of minority voters, effectively diluting their influence while benefiting more informed/organized (often wealthier or elite) voters who fill out full rankings.
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- It hasn’t fixed the problems it promised to solve. Negative campaigning still happens. Strategic “burying” of opponents is possible. And 19 states have banned it precisely because of these headaches — plus fears it complicates elections and erodes trust. (news.ballotpedia.org)
In short, while a few big cities and two states use it, RCV remains a niche experiment that most jurisdictions have rejected or banned. The added complexity, discarded votes, cost, and trust issues are exactly why critics call it a nightmare — especially when the traditional system (or simple runoffs) is simpler, faster, and clearer.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV, also called instant-runoff voting) is used in a tiny fraction of U.S. elections. As of March 2026, only 49 jurisdictions in the entire country use RCV for public elections (or have passed it for upcoming ones). This includes:
- 2 states use it statewide: Maine (since 2018 for most federal and state races) and Alaska (since 2022 for federal and statewide races). Hawaii uses it only for limited special elections. Washington, D.C. is rolling it out for its 2026 primaries.
- 36 cities and 3 counties use it for local elections (mayor, city council, etc.). Examples include New York City (primaries only), Minneapolis, St. Paul, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Cambridge (MA), and a handful of others like Fort Collins (CO, first use in 2025).
That’s it. RCV reaches roughly 14–17 million voters across ~22 states + D.C., but it’s not used in the vast majority of places. For context on “out of every city, county, state election”:
- States: 2 out of 50 (~4%) use it fully statewide.
- Counties: 3 out of 3,143 (0.1%).
- Cities/municipalities: ~36–50 out of ~19,000+ municipalities that hold elections (well under 0.3%).
In 2025, only 18 cities/counties actually used it in elections. Nineteen states have outright banned RCV. Adoption has grown slowly from ~10 cities in 2016, but it remains rare and faces pushback (including repeal efforts like Alaska’s 2026 ballot measure).
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