It’s a myth that voters are so stupid they can’t rank the candidates in order of preference. The NYC RCV election was very well-liked by the people who used it. It didn’t change the outcome, --the leading Dem won – but the race was more civilized.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) sounds good in theory, but it has serious flaws that make it a risky system to adopt.
- Voter Confusion: The complexity of RCV creates confusion. Many voters don’t rank all candidates, leading to “exhausted ballots” that aren’t counted in the final rounds. This means that not every voter’s choice is actually considered in the end, leaving some essentially disenfranchised.
- False Majority: RCV doesn’t necessarily produce a true majority winner. A candidate with fewer first-round votes can end up winning after later rounds of eliminations, even though they weren’t the initial favorite. This undermines the idea that RCV reflects the will of the majority.
- High Costs: Claims that RCV saves money by eliminating runoffs don’t account for the significant costs of implementing new voting systems, educating voters, and upgrading infrastructure. Many jurisdictions have found the transition to RCV expensive, and the promised savings don’t always materialize.
- Strategic Voting and “Safe” Candidates: Despite claims that RCV eliminates strategic voting, voters may still feel pressured to rank candidates based on electability rather than true preference. Worse, RCV can encourage bland, middle-ground candidates who try to be everyone’s second choice instead of standing firmly for their values.
- Mixed Success: Many places that tried RCV have seen mixed results or even rolled it back after finding it didn’t improve elections or voter satisfaction. It’s not the cure-all that some advocates claim.
RCV introduces more problems than it solves. Instead of adding complexity, we should focus on improving the system we already have, making voting simpler and more transparent for everyone.
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Actually, I did provide evidence of RCV’s tendency to perform on par with the status quo. It’s what I led with in my first comment here:
The reason all the Cardinal/Condorcet/Proportional methods people show up whenever RCV is mentioned is because we understand it just inherently leads back to FPTP. If RCV really is so good, why all the repeals? Why has it failed to elevate independents and 3rd party candidates?
To be blunt: We’ve done the experiments, and RCV is a bust. It’s time to move on to something with more promise and stop hindering the progress of legitimate electoral reform.
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Rank choice voting is terrible policy. It has all but ruined voting in Alaska
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I can’t give you the details, but from my reading, which has been extensive (which is partly why I cannot give you details, because I don’t remember where everything was that I read), this is basically a method of achieving communism, and it completely destroys the minority party. It should be banned everywhere. I urge you to withdraw this suggestion. Please. This will only hurt our country. My state is in dire straits as it stands, with election fraud putting people in power who never got the vote of the vast majority of counties (one single populous county overturned the wishes of all the other counties). If we had ranked voting, there would be absolutely no hope of ever restoring our state to any reasonable status as a place of freedom.
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By the way, your post is an excellent illustration of a weakness in this site: there should be a way to give a proposal a down vote. There isn’t one.
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There is something weird about STAR voting. Its advocates are so well-organized! For a system that no one uses! It reminds me of MMT. Some powerful people are backing it somewhere: smells like astroturf.
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You’re accusing us of astroturfing? That’s rich: An effort to implement STAR in Oregon was killed in part by astroturfing from pro-RCV organizations.
It’s really disgusting and vile that RCV advocates will, on the one hand, fight tooth and nail to prevent anyone from trying STAR; then, suddenly, they turn and use “no one uses it” as an argument against it.
If RCV advocates truly were interested in the truth, they’d support efforts to implement STAR, if only for testing. But they don’t, because they can’t stand competition.
Also, if you’re going to claim “Some powerful people are backing [STAR] somewhere”, how about some proof, eh? RCV has Andrew Yang, millions of dollars in backing, and was recently proposed again in Congress. If powerful people liking an idea is enough to raise your suspicion, that is a reason to distrust RCV; not STAR.
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Whether its RCV or STAR (learning theres a LOT of tribalism in those camps), the concern remains the same… Killing off the “wasting your vote”/“vote for X is a vote for Y” nonsense.
Example: x.com
Having chatted with them, I honestly think it’s just a group of highly-passionate people who have a lot of confirmation bias & anchoring bias 
Voting methods are hard! I think they genuinely wanted to find something better (RCV has its flaws), but then got stuck in it & didn’t realize it’s worse
I tried to solve the problems with RCV myself, thought I had it figured out!
But nope, it’s as good as it gets
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I hear you. Perfection will be unattainable. For me, its about “empowering folks to vote their heart & conscience” rather than “vote for who can win”. I feel like RCV is gaining steam, so I want to get support behind it. The goal being to get some form of improvement in place. We can argue the next iteration of improvements after. But, in this moment, the extremity of the primaries that set up a FPTP race has been dragging us down since Bush v Gore.
At the very least, with RCV, I can feel good about putting a “3rd Party” candidate on top without the feeling of “wasting a vote”, bc that person is a long shot.
I can see the parties putting up more centrists to win in Round 2. That’s where it’s best for all of us. More folks putting support behind candidates they truly believe in AND using the 2nd & 3rd preferences to express which candidates they feel are a good compromise.
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Except RCV doesn’t do that. Voting your heart and conscience can and does backfire. This is exactly what happened to Palin voters in the 2022 Alaska Special Congressional Election. By voting their heart and conscience, they got a worse result than if some of them had just stayed home.
This is why Republicans pressured Nancy Dahlstrom to drop out leading up to the current election.
More folks putting support behind candidates they truly believe in AND using the 2nd & 3rd preferences to express which candidates they feel are a good compromise.
The problem is RCV gives zero weight to any preference beyond first, unless the voter’s first preference is eliminated. So the candidates who are a good compromise get eliminated early, and you just end up with two polarizing options going into the final round.
All good election methods consider all support the voter intended to give to all the candidates simultaneously. It is a required property to prevent spoiler candidates and actually remove the strategic incentive to vote on electability (“who can win”) instead of principle.
If you particularly like ranking, I’d beg that you consider supporting a Condorcet method such as Ranked Robin, instead of RCV:
- It is one of those systems that does make full use of the information on your ballot.
- It allows the voter to give equal ranks, which is both simpler for voters and allows them to give an opinion on more candidates than they are given ranks.
- It is simpler for election administrators to run.
RCV is not an improvement over our current system whatsoever. This is not about perfectionism. This is about actually having an impact. RCV will fail to have an impact other than add to the mental load of voters, and complicate the process for election administrators, so it is a waste of time and effort for anyone to promote it.
If we do adopt RCV at a large scale, one of two things will happen:
- The public will hate it and go back to FPTP. We will then try to move to something else, and the public will say “no way, we’re not doing this again”. It will then take at least another 20 years to actually try something else the next generation might be open to.
- It will stick, but people will slowly begin to realize it had no impact. 20 years after implementation, we will still be stuck with two parties, and it will be obvious people are still just voting for the more viable candidate.
In this sense, RCV is actually an existential threat to the election reform movement. We must drop it if we want to make legitimate progress.
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It sounds good in theory, but hasn’t this turned out to be a bad thing in Alaska?
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Ranked choice voting across the board!
Only for the losers.
RCV is a complicated “solution” (scare quotes intended) to a non-existent problem. The political map and health of the republic would change radically and for the better if we went back to paper ballots, marked, collected, and counted before witnesses on election day, with ID required on-site and indelible ink on the finger to lessen the possibility of cheaters. Oh, and ballot final tabulations required from each state by 23:59:59 on election day.
Whole different topic re: use of paper ballots and how/when counting is executed.
The issues that RCV (or STAR/AR) address are real and do exist. Plurality winners in a primary, general, or down ballot election promote more fervent, extreme views misrepresenting the general populous. It addresses the accusations of “wasting a vote” often laid on voters who don’t want to vote for the “top 2”. And it hastens the run off process, where already in practice, and saves a ton of money in holding additional elections at later dates with lower turnout.
Personally, I think a simple, basic runoff system is far better. The idea of selling it as an “Instant” run off process is both misleading and carries undue impatience.
Leftists in the US have gone so hard toward Stalin that they deride perfectly mainstream positions of just a few years ago as “extreme views.” Only Dems support RCV because the problem of “extreme views” exists only in their heads. American patriots who want Constitutional governance, like me, are “extremists” to these Marxist radicals. It’s absurd!
Even stranger is that, if you compare the Dem platform with the explicitly enumerated powers articulated in Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution, it’s clear who the extremists are: nothing on the Dem platform derives from legitimate constitutional powers, and that’s been the case for decades. They are literal domestic enemies of the Constitution. RCV would ensure that communist-adjacent “moderate” candidates take office.
The “wasted vote” claim is an idiotic partisan whip used to try to flail independents into supporting particular partisan candidates. No vote is wasted. It’s a laughable notion.
The run-off process is enabled, in part, by the cheating partisans (and Dems in particular) I mentioned. The paper ballots etc are not a different topic at all, since ending election corruption would finally let us know who actually got the most legitimate votes, thereby making most run-offs unnecessary. Election cheating and RCV transparently compliment each other, so it’s no surprise that fans of one support the other.
If you do research on this topic, you will learn what a terrible idea it is.
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