Ranked Choice Voting: The Overhyped Mess That Promised Paradise and Delivered ChaosRanked Choice Voting was sold to us like a miracle cure for American elections. No more spoilers! Majority winners guaranteed! Civil campaigns where candidates court second-place love instead of torching each other! Voters finally get their “true preferences” expressed in a glorious multi-round symphony of democracy!
Spoiler alert: in Alaska 2022 and New York City’s 2021 mayoral primaries, the symphony sounded more like a toddler smashing a xylophone while the adults argued over the sheet music.Start with Alaska’s special House election in 2022. The state had just rolled out its shiny new Top-Four primary plus ranked-choice general, courtesy of a ballot measure that promised better representation and less polarization.
What happened?
In a deep-red state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to that seat in nearly half a century, Democrat Mary Peltola beat former Governor Sarah Palin. Cue the Republican meltdown, and for once they had a point about the system’s quirks.First-round results: Peltola around 40%, Palin about 31%, Republican Nick Begich roughly 28%. No majority, so Begich gets eliminated. His second-choice votes get redistributed. Most go to Palin, but enough leak to Peltola that she scrapes past 50% of the remaining ballots. Tom Cotton tweeted the obvious: roughly 60% of voters ranked a Republican first, yet a Democrat “won.”
Ballot exhaustion—those voters who ranked Begich and stopped—helped seal it. About one-fifth of Begich’s ballots just vanished from further counting.Even better for the “RCV fixes everything” crowd: Begich was the Condorcet winner. Head-to-head, more voters preferred him over both Peltola and Palin. RCV still tossed him first because of vote-splitting among Republicans. The system that was supposed to eliminate the spoiler effect delivered a textbook center-squeeze. Some analyses noted the perverse incentives: certain Palin voters would have been better off staying home entirely, because their participation helped eliminate the candidate they preferred over the eventual winner. Progressive Democrat wins in Republican Alaska not because she was the consensus choice, but because the ranking algorithm performed its little magic trick. And results took weeks because, you know, complexity. Peak democracy.
Then there’s New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s first big ranked-choice experiment. Voters could rank up to five candidates. Advocates promised it would force niceness and produce a broad-appeal winner. Instead, we got the New York City Board of Elections doing what it does best: spectacular incompetence.On election night, Eric Adams led in first-choice votes. Days later, the Board released ranked tallies showing his lead collapsing toward Kathryn Garcia—only to yank them hours later. Why? They had accidentally left 135,000 test ballots in the system. Dummy data mixed with real votes, published to the public, then sheepishly retracted. The agency that couldn’t clear test files was somehow going to flawlessly execute multi-round preference tabulation across a city of millions.
Final results dragged on for weeks. Adams ultimately won, but barely; Garcia came within about 8,000 votes after transfers. Exhausted ballots abounded. Voters who didn’t rank far enough simply disappeared from later rounds.Did RCV deliver the civil campaign utopia? Adams denounced a Yang-Garcia cross-endorsement as a racist plot. Campaigns still went negative. The process that was supposed to clarify the public will instead produced days of confusion, recriminations, and a fresh wave of distrust in the already-notorious Board of Elections. Ranked choice didn’t cause the test-ballot fiasco—pure administrative bungling did—but it layered extra complexity onto an agency that already struggled with basic counting.
When your shiny new voting method requires perfect software hygiene from people who leave dummy data in the live system, maybe the problem isn’t just the operators.These cases expose the gap between the glossy brochure and reality. RCV does not reliably produce “majority” winners of all ballots cast; it produces majorities of non-exhausted ballots after successive eliminations. It does not eliminate spoilers or guarantee the Condorcet consensus candidate. It slows results, invites exhaustion, and can punish sincere first-choice voting in multi-candidate fields.
In Alaska, it handed a Republican-leaning electorate a Democrat via second preferences and exhausted ballots. In New York it turned a primary into a public-relations dumpster fire complete with phantom votes.Defenders will insist the systems “worked as designed” and that critics are just sore losers. Fair enough—Peltola and Adams won under the rules. But the hype was never “it works as designed.” The hype was majority rule without runoff elections, reduced polarization, no spoilers, clearer voter intent, and smoother democracy. Alaska and New York delivered the opposite: delayed counts, exhausted ballots, Condorcet failures, administrative farce, and outcomes that left large chunks of the electorate feeling the process had gamed them.
Ranked Choice Voting remains a favorite of good-government types who treat complexity as sophistication. Actual elections keep showing that when you replace “pick one” with a ranking tournament, you don’t magically get consensus. You get more moving parts, more opportunities for exhaustion and elimination quirks, and more chances for the people running the system to screw it up in public. The next time someone tells you RCV is the future, point them to the Last Frontier and the five boroughs. The future looked a lot like the same old mess—just with extra steps and a longer wait for the final score.
First, Alaska is not really a Red state – it has a majority of independents, more than any other state. Nonetheless, with a normal Republican candidate other than Sarah Palin, the split Republican vote would have consolidated around one of the Republicans. But Sarah Palin lost because many independent and Republican voters had soured on her antics, and preferred a moderate Democrat. RCV should be compared to other systems, not analyzed in isolation – the Democrat was ahead in the first round, and would have won under the prior plurality election system, since there would be no second round. The bigger lesson from Alaska is that with RCV, Republicans didn’t have to worry about being primaried, and the Republicans in the Alaska State Legislature formed a bipartisan coalition with moderate Democrats, rather than let themselves be held hostage to a handful of extremist Republicans, as happens in the US. House.
Re Condorcet, the RCV winner is almost always the Condorcet winner – over 99% of the time. You found the one exception. (For those that don’t know, Condorcet uses the same ranked ballot as RCV, but figures out who would win all the one-on-one matchups. The problem is that sometimes no one wins them all, so you need a system like RCV for those situations.).
Re ballot exhaustion, where a ballot is discarded if a round is reached where the voter stopped ranking, again what are you comparing this too? More people’s votes count toward the winner even with RCV ballot exhaustion than in a plurality election, and more count than in a separate runoff election, where turnouts drop by about half.
Re New York City’s test ballot issue, problems like that occur with the testing of any new voting system. That has nothing to do with RCV. Also, delayed results are not due to RCV – it can produce results instantly. Delayed results are due to late mail-in ballots being accepted.
With respect to civility, RCV produces that in the majority of elections, not all of them. You found one of the exceptions. No election system is perfect, but RCV is heads and shoulders above what we have now.
– Paul Haughey, CalRCV.org Board member, U.C. Irvine class of 1976
Gosh Paul. I seem to find the exception to every rule you have for RCV. Maybe you need to qualify your claims about its perceived benefits
There are exceptions to every rule, period. Other voting systems have drawbacks all the time, while RCV rarely has them. Vote splitting and spoilers are frequent in plurality elections, while you found the 1 in 1000 exception where RCV allegedly didn’t cure that.
The idea that ranked choice voting leads to more “exhausted ballots” is a myth. Hint: it’s actually a benefit of RCV over tradition choose-one voting.
For example, with traditional choose-one voting:
Primary elections: If your preferred candidate loses the primary, you cannot transfer your vote to another primary candidate.
Runoff elections: If you voted in the first round but don’t vote in the runoff, your influence disappears in the final decision. This is effectively a much larger form of ballot exhaustion.
Multi-question ballots: Voters often skip races further down the ballot (“ballot roll-off” or “undervoting”), meaning those contests are decided without their participation.
Approval voting: If none of the candidates you approved remain competitive, your ballot no longer affects the outcome.
One person, one vote. If you didn’t vote for the person who got the most votes. Too bad. People get that. Voters make one choice. I can’t go back and re-arrange my March Madness bracket because of an upset.
Irvine doesn’t have primaries for city council or mayor; your example seeks a solution to something that’s not a problem
To use your analogy, if there is a tie in basketball, there is overtime, or there can be a play-in game for a tournament. For elections, many states and cities (not Irvine) provide a separate runoff election if no one has at least 50% of the vote. They do that because they believe in majority rule. The additional rounds of RCV are exactly like a runoff election, except instantly. That is why it is sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting. It’s better than a separate runoff election, because those costs millions to run, and have about half the turnout.
It wasn’t an analogy. Like Ryan Dack’s pizza topping example, that doesn’t work. It’s one person, one vote. Not one person with changeable votes
Mr. Haughey: I am glad you brought up the issue of ties. The Irvine initiative states that when candidates are tied for elimination, the decision is made “By Lot”. This absurd idea is nuts!
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:76a36ca0-f53e-43f4-b782-fd3522c5d538
Candidate “A” has a plurality in the first round. Candidate “B” is eliminated despite being the first and second choice of all ballots. The second round has a tie between two candidates for elimination. It is decided “By Lot”. In the third round, candidate “C” wins, by lot.
This is an example of the pathetic ranked choice voting hoopla:
file:///C:/Users/Owner/Downloads/RCV%203%20Rounds.pdf
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:f3582506-c1cf-4f0d-b5cf-9457f90d06d3
Ranked choice voting doesn’t “select” the most popular candidate!