There is a wonderful moment in any political debate when an advocate for a controversial reform finally admits what critics have been saying all along.
Paul Haughey, a CalRCV.org board member, recently offered a remarkable defense of Ranked Choice Voting. His basic argument was that critics keep finding examples where RCV doesn’t live up to its promises—but that’s okay, because those examples are merely “exceptions.”
Alaska? Exception.
Condorcet winner? Exception.
Ballot exhaustion? Nothing to see here.
New York City’s election problems? Not RCV’s fault.
Civility? RCV works in the “majority” of elections. You just happened to find an exception.
Well, there you have it.
Apparently, the new RCV standard is not that the system works as advertised. The standard is that when it doesn’t, simply call the failure an exception. That is certainly one way to run a reform campaign.
Haughey’s Alaska defense is particularly entertaining. He argues that Alaska “is not really a Red state” because it has a large independent population, and suggests that with a normal Republican candidate instead of Sarah Palin, Republican voters would have consolidated around one candidate. But that is precisely the problem with the Alaska example. The 2022 Alaska special election featured Democrat Mary Peltola, Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, and a Libertarian candidate. Peltola actually led the first-choice vote count with 48.77%, while Palin received 25.74% and Begich 23.33%. Under Alaska’s RCV rules, if nobody reaches 50% plus one in the first round, the lowest candidate is eliminated and votes are redistributed.
So Haughey’s argument essentially becomes: RCV didn’t produce the outcome Republicans wanted because Republicans nominated two candidates who split their vote—and that’s somehow evidence that RCV is working. Except under a conventional plurality system, Peltola also would have won because she received the most votes. That’s an important point. The Alaska example isn’t necessarily evidence that RCV “stole” an election from Republicans. It is evidence that RCV didn’t magically prevent a candidate from winning who already led the first-choice vote.
And Haughey’s suggestion that Republicans should simply nominate “normal” candidates is an interesting prescription from someone defending an electoral system. Apparently RCV works best when political parties make better candidate choices. Breaking news: so does every other voting system.
Haughey’s response to the Condorcet criticism is even better. The Condorcet method asks which candidate would beat every other candidate in one-on-one matchups. Haughey acknowledges that RCV can produce a winner who isn’t the Condorcet winner. His response? “You found the one exception.” That’s it. The argument isn’t that the problem doesn’t exist. The argument is that the critic found it. This is becoming a pattern.
Critic: “Here is an election where RCV doesn’t produce the Condorcet winner.” RCV advocate: “Exception to the rule.”
Critic: “Here is an election where ballots are exhausted.” RCV advocate: “Exception to the rule.”
Critic: “Here is an election where civility wasn’t particularly civil.” RCV advocate: “Exception to the rule.”
Critic: “Here is an election where results took a long time.” RCV advocate: “Not RCV.”
At some point, “exceptions” stop being a rebuttal and start being a research agenda.
Haughey’s response to ballot exhaustion is equally clever. He asks what we should compare it to. And that’s a fair question. Ballot exhaustion is still a feature of the RCV process, not a figment invented by opponents. If a voter ranks only one or two candidates and all of those candidates are eliminated, that ballot no longer participates in the later rounds. RCV advocates can reasonably argue that this is preferable to what happens in a separate runoff, where some voters don’t return to vote. But that doesn’t make exhausted ballots disappear. And it certainly doesn’t justify pretending that every voter who cast a ballot necessarily participated in the final decision.
RCV’s own mechanics acknowledge that rankings matter from round to round. Alaska’s official explanation says the process continues until two candidates remain and the candidate with the most votes wins. That’s a legitimate electoral system. But it isn’t magic.
This is perhaps the favorite defense mechanism of RCV advocates everywhere. Something goes wrong? “That’s not RCV.” A technical problem with testing ballots? Not RCV. Delayed results? Not RCV. Problems administering the election? Not RCV. Candidate behavior? Not RCV. Ballot exhaustion? Well, that’s technically RCV, but don’t compare it to anything inconvenient. Of course, some problems really aren’t caused by RCV. Haughey is correct that a voting-system controversy shouldn’t automatically be blamed on the voting method itself. But that standard has to work both ways.
If RCV advocates get to claim every successful RCV election as proof that RCV works, they don’t get to exile every unsuccessful or problematic election to the Island of Things That Don’t Count. That isn’t analysis. That’s brand management. That’s spin.
Haughey says RCV produces civility in “the majority of elections,” but admits it doesn’t happen in all of them. Again: exception. FairVote’s own research does provide evidence that voters in some RCV cities perceived less negative campaigning than voters in comparable plurality cities. That’s worth acknowledging. But even FairVote’s research describes voter perceptions and campaign tone—not a guarantee that RCV transforms politicians into civic-minded angels. And that’s really the larger problem with the RCV sales pitch. RCV can be defended as a different way of counting votes. It can be debated as a potentially useful alternative to plurality voting. What it cannot honestly be is a political religion in which every success proves the theory and every failure is an exception.
And that brings us back to Irvine. Joshua Moore argues on NextDoor that a “true democratic mandate” requires a majority. It doesn’t matter that RCV is six-tenths of one percent of all voting jurisdictions nationally and that plurality is 99.4% — that’s immaterial according to Moore. But plurality elections are a recognized democratic form of election. The question is not whether plurality voting is democratic; the question is whether voters prefer plurality, runoff, RCV or another system. That’s a crucial distinction. And Irvine has another inconvenient problem for the “instant runoff” sales pitch: Irvine doesn’t have a runoff problem. RCV is routinely marketed as “instant runoff voting.” Alaska itself describes its RCV system as IRV, or Instant Runoff Voting.
Fine.
But if Irvine isn’t conducting expensive second-round elections for these municipal races, what exactly is the crisis RCV is being brought in to solve? Perhaps the answer is that RCV advocates don’t like plurality winners. That’s a legitimate philosophical position. But it is not the same thing as proving Irvine has a broken election system. And Haughey’s own comments reveal something important.
When critics identify an RCV problem, the response is increasingly:
That’s an exception.
When another problem appears:
That’s another exception.
And another:
You found the one exception.
Eventually, Irvine voters are entitled to ask a very simple question: If RCV is “heads and shoulders above” the existing system, why does defending it require such a large collection of exceptions? Maybe the exceptions don’t prove the rule. Maybe they’re telling us something about the rule.
And perhaps before Irvine replaces a simple system—where the candidate with the most votes wins—with a more complicated system that requires voters to rank candidates, tabulators to count multiple rounds and advocates to explain away every inconvenient outcome than a promise that all the problems are merely exceptions. Because if the best defense of RCV is that it works beautifully—except when it doesn’t—then Irvine voters might reasonably respond: Thanks. We’ll keep the system we have.
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