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).
I’m afraid you have been misled by biased studies. It should not be a surprise that those who have obtained power through a partisan minority feel threatened by majority rule. That is why 17 states have banned RCV – because they fear a majority would not elect them. Partisan think tanks have also funded biased RCV studies that are misleading because they fear majority rule. Irvine has had candidates elected with much less than a majority. Many other cities address this by using a runoff. But to avoid the expense of a separate runoff election, which typically has low turnout, an instant runoff can be done with Ranked Choice Voting. Below I fact check the bullet points in your article.
Voter Confusion. The studies that have shown voter confusion use online mock elections without an explanation of how RCV works. That is why, when adopting RCV, public education campaigns occur. Even the online confusion is small – a few percentage points more than the people who are confused by existing elections.
Errors. Ballots being thrown out because voters only ranked one candidate is not an error, it is a voter choice. If that’s an error, all the votes for losing candidates in Irvine elections are errors – a much higher rate. The reason many only voted for one candidate in Alaska is because Sarah Palin, the candidate, told them not to rank anyone else – a dumb campaign strategy. Error rates are indeed higher in lower-income or lower-education areas, but this is also true with regular plurality elections, like Irvine’s existing elections.
Ballot “exhaustion.” It is correct that if you don’t rank enough candidates, your ballot could be thrown out in later rounds. However, using this logic, in existing plurality elections, such as in Irvine – anyone who didn’t vote for the winning candidate has their vote “thrown out.” More votes count with RCV since everyone gets a second choice. They often stop ranking when they get to candidates they don’t like, so their vote is “thrown out” on purpose.
Counting speed. Counting is not slower because of multiple rounds of RCV. The counting is done instantaneously by a computer program, just like current elections. The delays are due to late mail-in ballots, and country registrars sometimes decide not to run the RCV software until the late votes are in. It does have some cost – it requires licensing a new software module. But Irvine elections are run by Orange County, which uses Hart election software, which has an RCV module (which is used in Eureka, an adopter of RCV). Recounts and hand counts are not difficult – the paper ballots are put in piles, and the smallest pile has its ballots moved to the pile of the marked next choice, until a pile has a majority.
It does not violate “one person, one vote.” The courts have consistently held RCV constitutional. The vote just gets transferred to another choice during the RCV instant runoff, just like in separate runoff elections.
It helps minority and lower-turnout voters. A study of the RCV election in New York indeed found higher exhaustion rates in districts with higher concentrations of minority voters. The study concluded that this thus effectively diluted their influence. What the study failed to acknowledge was that the result of the election was the highest minority representation on the NY city council in the city’s history. While higher, the minority ballot exhaustion was a small amount, and was dwarfed by more minorities being encouraged to run for office and vote under RCV.
Reduction of negative campaigning. RCV doesn’t promise to eliminate negative campaigning, but it does reduce it. Candidates want the second choice votes of their opponents’ voters, so they don’t want to offend them. Partly because of this, more minorities and women run for office with RCV. RCV works, and is used in 36 cities, including California cities Redondo Beach, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, Albany and Eureka.
To read a review of many of the flawed RCV studies, check out this paper analyzing 41 studies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5238675
Irvine would benefit from RCV. 10 of the 16 mayoral elections in which someone wasn’t running unopposed were won with only a plurality of the vote – not a majority. In 2024, Larry Agran won with 38.76%. RCV would ensure that the mayor and city council have majority support of the electorate, eliminating vote-splitting between similar candidates and the spoiler effect.
– Paul Haughey, U.C. Irvine class of 1976
Thank you for a responsible explanation. My thoughts are, vote for who you want on the first round. Those votes should weigh more.
The key question here is whether a person believes in majority rule or not. If you believe that majority rule is a must-have of democracy, then you simply can not support plurality winners. Simple example: Someone wins with 40% of the vote, due to vote splitting — that means that 60% of the voters preferred other candidates. That’s who you want as your councilmember or mayor?? Really??
Therefore, you either need runoff elections or RCV. Runoff elections are extremely expensive for the city and for candidates, and there is a frightfully low turnout for elections that are not general elections. With RCV, you get a majority winner in a single high turnout elections. Only RCV does this.
It’s ludicrous and insulting to claim that voters are too stupid to say, “Smith is my favorite, but just in case they don’t win, Jones is my backup vote, and then I think I like that gal Robinson next, so they get are my #3 vote.” It puts much more power in the hands of the voters, which is where the power should be.
A clarification: In RCV, #1 votes *are* much more important than #2 votes — 85% of candidates with the most #1 votes win the election. 15% of the time there are come-from-behind victories because the person who got the most #1 votes was never supported by a majority. With RCV, to win, you have to have both enthusiastic support (#1 votes) plus broad support (#2 and #3 votes) to get elected. And that’s the way it should be.
A comment: The fact that HS kids can easily use RCV doesn’t mean advocates are saying that adult elections should copy kids elections. That’s never what anyone said. It is, however, evidence that RCV is quite easy to use. And there are hundreds of exit polls that back that up.
A correction: 7 cities in California use RCV, not 9. They are: Redondo Beach, Eureka, San Leandro, Albany, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Berkeley. (Also, the LA Charter Review Commission just recommended RCV to the LA Council on a 10-1 vote. Sacramento is about to put it on the ballot via petition, and in 2028 it will probably be put on the San Diego ballot via petition. There is also a good chance that a statewide RCV bill will be passed in 2027.
you mentioned Berkeley twice; so it is six cities or seven?
Seems worth noting that all 19 of the states banning RCV are red states.
If the point of this website is explicitly to ‘challenge the right-wing’, its suspicious that this shares all their talking points against RCV…
Yes, RCV isn’t perfect, but it is obviously better than first-past-the-post.
Since the author doesn’t seem to see the big picture problem with how FPTP reinforces the duopolistic chokehold the two major parties have on American democracy, and how RCV addresses that, it’s hard not to suspect this stance as disingenuous.
I understand the criticisms, and some are valid, but NONE invalidate RCV as a better alternative to FPTP.
Ireland and Australia use RCV just fine and both rank (pun intended) significantly higher in their democratic health scores, by multiple different orgs like the EIU and Pew Research ctr. Guess where America’s at these days… we’re not #1, we’re not even in the top 10.
FPTP is the illusion of democracy. RCV delivers it.
Don’t let great be the enemy of good.
This blog has not been “challenging Orange County’s right wing noise machine” since Dan C. took over from Lawson. He should have renamed it ‘the moderate greater Irvine blog’ years ago.
So you didn’t the analysis of the gunbinatorial debate or the No Nick Shirley piece? Start your own blog but be sure to come out of the shadows. You can call it the “no backbone blog”
At the 4.28.26 council meeting, the only “report” was from Jeffrey Melching. He dropped a My Bad, I was wrong. He explained that the council had power to enact RCV with only a majority, they don’t have to bother us residents and pay $15,000 to have a citywide vote to see if 320,000 people want RCV.
During a meeting is it legal to change the Agenda subject from “let’s discuss having an election” to “you don’t need an election, just pass this at your will”? What happened to our right of advance notification?
The four people who passed this spared us the pain of deciding what we want. (This makes sense because our outsourced computers and Sacramento shenanigans are not certifiable as they are.)
This issue will be addressed a second time when our freedom will be chained into concrete and thrown over the pier. CRV will pass because of the 4 – 3 majority. When CRV is on the agenda again, I plan to show up to let Agran, Carroll and Mai know I back them up.
Melching also cited two CA governors who vetoed this as a statewide mandate. He said it was Schwartzenegger and Newsom when it was actually Jerry Brown and Newsom. That must be another “My bad, I was wrong”, because our lawyer would never lie to us.