Saturday’s mail brought a Pro-Rank Choice Voting flier to my Irvine Mailbox, addressed to my daughter and not my wife or me, so if someone was supposed to purge the database, lousy job.
‘And the pro-RCV team is still playing its greatest hits — claims that don’t match factchecking.
YOUR VOTE ALWAYS COUNTS
No — ranked-choice voting (RCV) does not guarantee that every vote will count toward the final result. It can reduce wasted votes compared with a traditional winner-take-all election, but ballots can still become inactive, and a voter’s lower-ranked choices may never affect the outcome. It becomes an exhausted ballot.
BETTER CAMPAIGNS (encourages a stronger, more diverse field of candidates to enter the race)
A 2025 American Journal of Political Science study found no statistically significant increase in the share of female or non-White candidates after RCV adoption.
A 2026 study in the American Journal of Political Science identifies an important limitation: when voters’ preferences are divided along strong partisan, ethnic, or cultural lines, candidates may have incentives to target particular groups rather than broaden their appeal.
But the strongest available evidence does not establish that RCV itself reliably produces a more diverse candidate pool.
PROVEN TO WORK (RCV used successfully in many California cities for more than 20 years)
”Many” means six cities in all of California use RCV instead of plurality voting.
As of October 2026, the United States overwhelmingly uses plurality voting, while ranked-choice voting (RCV) is used in a small minority of election jurisdictions. The key distinction is that the U.S. has more than 10,000 election-administration jurisdictions, while approximately 49 jurisdictions are identified by FairVote as using RCV in public elections or having adopted it for upcoming elections, according to its March 2026 count. So 99.51% of the country doesn’t use RCV.
STRICT SAFEGUARDS FOR TAXPAYERS
The Orange County ROV is not set up for RCV; they don’t know how much it will cost. And if Irvine is the only city to go for RCV, the cost will be Bourne by the city which is already spending too much than it did four years ago. A cost cap as protection for taxpayers is like counting on winning the lottery for your retirement.
REJECT TRUMP’S ANTI-DEMOCRACY AGENDA
STOP TRUMP AND MAGA; Trump won twice without 50% of the vote; extreme candidates lose when elections require a true 50% majority. Let me take you back to 1992 and 1996 and 2000. Bill Clinton was elected and re-elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. George W. Bush wan also elected with less than 50% of the vote. John F. Kennedy had 49.7%. Richards Nixon won in 1968 with 43%. Anyone writing this flier take American History of study political science? With only 49 voting jurisdictions using RCV, stating it will reduce right wing extremism is simply not provable.
If I was grading this as a paper, it’s get an F. Most claims not supported by facts. I’ll leave this post with a simple fact:
Plurality voting is one way to implement democratic elections, but it does not necessarily mean that the winner has the support of a majority of voters.
Dropping in details from the studies:
There are several academic studies from 2023 and 2025 that challenge claims made by advocates of ranked-choice voting (RCV). The key distinction is that some studies find no measurable improvement in representation or candidate diversity, while others identify potential drawbacks involving voter satisfaction and ballot errors.
1. The 2023 study: Come-from-behind victories and voter satisfaction
Published June 21, 2023 · Politics & Policy
“Come-from-behind victories under ranked-choice voting and runoff: The impact on voter satisfaction”
Author: Joseph Cerrone
What it found: The study used a survey experiment with U.S. voters to examine elections in which the eventual winner initially trails but wins after subsequent rounds of voting.
The researchers found that come-from-behind victories under RCV significantly reduced voter satisfaction. The negative effect was weaker for conventional runoff elections.
Why it matters: One argument for RCV is that it produces winners with broader support and improves confidence in election outcomes. This study suggests that the way a winner emerges can itself affect voter satisfaction, even when the voting system allows additional preferences to be counted.
Important limitation: This was a study of voter reactions to a particular election outcome, not proof that RCV consistently lowers satisfaction across actual elections or that voters overall prefer other systems.
2. The 2025 study: RCV did not increase candidate diversity
American Journal of Political Science, volume 69, issue 3, 2025
“Running toward rankings: Ranked choice voting’s impact on candidate entry and descriptive representation”
Author: Jonathan Colner
This is one of the clearest studies challenging claims about RCV’s effects on local elections.
What it found:
More candidates, but temporarily: The number of candidates increased initially after RCV adoption, but the effect faded in subsequent election cycles.
No lasting improvement in candidate diversity: The study found no significant increase in the proportion of women or non-white candidates running for office.
The additional candidates were often less viable: The initial increase was largely driven by candidates who received little electoral support and had limited government experience.
How the study was conducted: Colner analyzed data from 273 cities over three decades, using a preregistered difference-in-differences design with matching. This approach attempts to distinguish the effects of RCV adoption from changes that might have occurred anyway.
Why it matters: RCV is sometimes promoted as a way to encourage more candidates to run and improve descriptive representation. This study found that adopting RCV alone did not reliably deliver those results.
One timing clarification: Colner’s working paper was posted in January 2023, but the peer-reviewed journal article was published in 2025. So you may see this research described as either a 2023 or a 2025 study, depending on which version is cited.
3. Another important 2025 study: More ballot errors and rejected votes
Political Behavior · Published online March 15, 2025
“Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting”
Authors: Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley
What it found:
Approximately 4.8% of voters improperly marked their ballot in a typical ranked-choice race.
Votes in ranked-choice races were about 10 times more likely to be rejected because of improper marking than votes in non-ranked races.
Improper marking was associated with precincts with higher concentrations of non-white voters and lower-income households in some of the jurisdictions studied.
The researchers analyzed nearly three million ranked-choice ballot records from Alaska, Maine, New York City and San Francisco.
Important qualification: Most improperly marked ballots were still counted. The 10-times figure refers to the relative likelihood of rejection, not to 10% of all RCV ballots being rejected. The study also covers four jurisdictions, so its results should not automatically be generalized to every RCV election.
As you admit, Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) can “reduce wasted votes compared with a traditional winner-take-all election.” That’s the point – to improve the elections. No system is perfect, but RCV is much better. If someone doesn’t bother to rank more than one candidate, yes their vote will be wasted. But the rate is much lower in RCV elections than runoff elections where half the electorate doesn’t vote, and their voice is wasted.
I won’t get into the gritty details of why the studies you cite are wrong. I’ll simply note that it shouldn’t surprise anyone that those who rose to power with divisive tactics to get support from an extreme minority are opposed to RCV, and have funded supposedly impartial think tanks to produce biased, non-peer reviewed “studies.” Here is a link to a paper reviewing over 40 RCV studies and exposing the clearly flawed methodologies used to attack RCV: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5238675