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RANKED CHOICE VOTING IS A BAD CHOICE

Report Election Integrity

RANKED CHOICE VOTING IS A BAD CHOICE

August 23, 2019 12 min read Download Report

Authors: Hans von Spakovsky and J. Adams

Summary

You will not believe what “reformers” have devised to tinker with and manipulate
our elections. It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff
voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow
candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections. In the end, it is
all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and
for preserving our great republic. So-called reformers want to change process
rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ranked choice voting is a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow
candidates with marginal support from voters to win.

It obscures true debates and issue-driven dialogs among candidates and
eliminates genuine binary choices between two top-tier candidates.

It also disenfranchises voters, because ballots that do not include the two
ultimate finalists are cast aside to manufacture a faux majority for the winner.

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You will not believe what “reformers” have devised to tinker with and manipulate
our elections. It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff
voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow
candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections. Some
jurisdictions in the U.S. have already replaced traditional elections with the
ranked choice scheme.1

Ella Nilsen, “Maine Voters Blew Up Their Voting System and Started From
Scratch,” Vox, June 12, 2018,
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/12/17448450/maine-ranked-choice-voting-paul-lepage-instant-runoff-2018-midterms
(accessed August 17, 2019). However, ranked choice voting only applies to
federal elections, not state elections, because the Maine Supreme Judicial Court
held that the law conflicts with the state’s constitution. Opinion of the
Justices, 162 A.3d 188, at 209–211 (Me. 2017). Some municipalities in states
like California, Minnesota, and Washington State also use ranked choice voting.
Simon Waxman, “Ranked-Choice Voting Is Not the Solution,” Democracy Journal,
November 3, 2016,
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/ranked-choice-voting-is-not-the-solution/
(accessed August 17, 2019).

Here is how it works. In 2008, instead of choosing to cast your ballot for John
McCain, Barack Obama, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, or Cynthia McKinney, all of whom
were running for president, you would vote for all of them and rank your choice.
In other words, you would list all five candidates on your ballot from one to
five, with one being your first choice for president and five being your last
choice.

If none of the candidates were chosen as the number one pick by a majority of
voters in Round One, then the presidential candidate with the lowest number of
votes would be eliminated from the ballot. People who selected that candidate as
their top pick—let us say it was McKinney—would automatically have their votes
changed to their second choice. Then the scores would be recalculated, over and
over again, until one of the candidates finally won a majority as the second,
third, or even fourth choice of voters.

In the end, a voter’s ballot might wind up being cast for the candidate he
ranked far below his first choice—a candidate to whom he may have strong
political objections and for whom he would not vote in a traditional voting
system.

RIGGING THE SYSTEM

We do not often agree with former California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. (D), but
he was right in 2016 when he vetoed a bill to expand ranked choice voting in his
state, saying it was “overly complicated and confusing” and “deprives voters of
genuinely informed choice.”2

David Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3? Not So Fast, Critics Say,”
Associated Press, October 9, 2016,
https://apnews.com/62c997cfd2ab403ca0b3c3333e1a9312 (accessed August 17, 2019).

Such a system would present many opportunities to rig the electoral system.

Think about what ranked choice voting destroys. It destroys your clear and
knowing choices as a political consumer. Let us call it the supermarket
contemplation. In reality, you are choosing one elected official to represent
you, just like you might choose one type of steak sauce to buy when you are
splurging for steaks. At the supermarket you ponder whether to buy A1, Heinz 57,
HP, or the really cheap generic brand you have never tried.

In the real world, you compare price, taste, mood, and maybe even the size of
the bottle and then decide on your steak sauce. You know nothing about the
generic brand, so you rank it last among your choices, while A1 is ranked a
distant third. In your mind, it comes down to Heinz or HP, and you choose the
Heinz. You buy that bottle and head home to the grill.

Now imagine if, instead, you had to rank-order all the steak sauces—even the
ones you dislike—and at checkout the cashier swaps out your bottle of Heinz 57
with the cheap generic you ranked dead last. Why? Well, the majority of shoppers
also down-voted it, but there was no clear front-runner, so the generic snuck up
from behind with enough down ballot picks to win. In fact, in this ranked choice
supermarket, you might even have helped the lousy generic brand win.

BALLOT EXHAUSTION

How could this happen? Because of a phenomenon known as ballot exhaustion. A
study published in 2015 that reviewed 600,000 votes cast using ranked choice
voting in four local elections in Washington State and California found that
“the winner in all four elections receive[d] less than a majority of the total
votes cast.”3

Craig M. Burnett and Vladimir Kogan, “Ballot and Voter ‘Exhaustion’ Under
Instant Runoff Voting: An Examination of Four Ranked-Choice Elections,”
Electoral Studies, Vol. 37 (2015), pp. 41–49,
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/e/1083/files/2014/12/ElectoralStudies-2fupfhd.pdf
(accessed August 17, 2019).

Going back to our original example of the 2008 presidential election, not all
voters are going to rank all five presidential candidates on their ballot. Many
voters may only list their top two or three candidates, particularly when there
are candidates on the ballot for whom they would never even consider voting.

Thus, if a voter only ranks two of the five candidates and those two are
eliminated in the first and second rounds of tabulation, their choices will not
be considered in the remaining rounds of tabulation. This ballot exhaustion
leads to candidates being elected who were not the first choice of a majority of
voters, but only a majority of “all valid votes in the final round of tallying.”
Thus, “it is possible that the winning candidate will fall short of an actual
majority,” eliminating the “influence [of many voters] over the final outcome.”4

Ibid., p. 42 (emphasis in original).

CAUTIONARY EXAMPLES

Another example of this problem is demonstrated by what happened in Australia
(which uses ranked choice voting) in the 2010 election. The liberal Labor Party
won the Australian House despite receiving only “38 percent of first-place votes
on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition [the
center right choice] captured 43 percent” of first-place votes.5

Waxman, “Ranked-Choice Voting Is Not the Solution.”

In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than a left-wing
government, but ranked choice made sure that did not happen.

Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the
candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a
candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after
nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.6

Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3?”

This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election
for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting
in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the
eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes
than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the
race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt
Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not
ranked all of the candidates.7

Baber v. Dunlap, 376 F.Supp.3d 125, footnote 6 (D. Maine 2018) (“Whether RCV
[ranked choice voting] is a better method for holding elections is not a
question for which the Constitution holds the answer…. To the extent that the
Plaintiffs call into question the wisdom of using RCV, they are free to do so
but…such criticism falls short of constitutional impropriety.” Baber, at 135).

Ranked choice obscures true debates, true issue-driven dialogues between and
among candidates, and eliminates genuine binary choices between two top-tier
candidates.

You never really know who will be running against whom in the final vote count
with ranked choice. Your votes are thrown into a fictional fantasy in which no
one knows which candidate is really a substitute for another candidate who may
not survive the initial rounds. It is all a numbers gimmick. You, as a voter,
are not given the opportunity to make the final decision between competing
substitutes.

As Professor James G. Gimpel, an expert on voter behavior, testified in a recent
case challenging Maine’s ranked choice voting law, “unlike ordinary elections
and ordinary runoffs, voters are required to make predictions about who will be
left standing following an initial tabulation of the votes.”8

Ibid., at 131.

He believes that “a portion of the voting public has insufficient interest and
information to make a meaningful assessment about likely outcomes.”9

Ibid., at 132. Thousands of ballots were discarded in the Second Congressional
District that was being litigated in this case, illustrating, according to
Professor Gimpel, “that those voters guessed wrong due to an information
deficit.” Ibid.

CLARITY OBSTRUCTION AND DISENFRANCHISEMENT

Ranked choice destroys clarity of political debate and forces voters to cast
ballots in hypothetical future runoff elections. When we have Republicans versus
Democrats versus Greens and Libertarians, we know who is running against whom
and what the actual distinctions are between the candidates on issues. Second-
or third-choice votes should not matter in America; they do not provide the
mandate that ensures that the representatives in a republic have the confidence
and support of a majority of the public in the legitimacy of their decisions.

Not only is ranked choice voting too complicated, it disenfranchises voters,
because ballots that do not include the two ultimate finalists are cast aside to
manufacture a faux majority for the winner. But it is only a majority of the
voters remaining in the final round, not a majority of all of the voters who
actually cast votes in the elections.

Ballot exhaustion is not just a minor problem with ranked choice voting.
According to the 2015 study, “a substantial number of voters either cannot or
choose not to rank multiple candidates, even when they have the ability to do
so.”10

Burnett and Kogan, “Ballot and Voter ‘Exhaustion’ Under Instant Runoff Voting,”
p. 49.

Instead, many voters “opt to cast a vote for their top choice, neglecting to
rank anyone else.”11

Ibid.

Additionally, some jurisdictions that have implemented ranked choice voting also
limit the number of candidates that can be ranked. All of the localities in the
study limited voters to ranking three candidates—even when there were more
candidates in the race. Thus, “if each of a voter’s top three candidates is
eliminated, his or her ballot becomes exhausted and, as a result, is excluded
from the final total.”12

Ibid., p. 44.

In other words, a ranked choice election will, in the end, boil down to only two
opposing candidates, but many voters (not knowing how the roulette wheel will
spin) will not cast ballots between those two choices. That voter ends up with
no say in the contest between the final two candidates in the black box
elections governed by ranked choice voting.

Of course, had that election been between just those two candidates in the first
place, that same voter would have heard debates, listened to the issues
discussed, and made an informed choice between those two. With ranked choice
voting, a candidate whose support was too marginal to get into public debates
may end up winning—eliminating the process that informs the electorate and
forcing average American voters into the world of mixed strategy game theory,
where they are forced to try to predict the probability that particular
candidates that they favor or do not favor will survive multiple rounds of vote
tabulation.13

Mixed-strategy game theory “is a probability distribution that assigns to each
available action a likelihood of being selected.” See “Mixed Strategy,”
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2nd ed., p. 290,
http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/MixedStrategy.pdf (accessed August 17, 2019).

TACTICAL GIMMICKRY

Ranked choice voting also provides voters with an incentive to tactically game
the system and falsify their preferences for candidates.

For example, if enough Ross Perot voters had listed George H. W. Bush as their
second choice over Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush might have won that presidential
election instead of Clinton. Since Perot came in third in the race, his votes
with Bush as the second choice would have counted for Bush in the second round
of vote tabulation.

If you could convince enough other voters to do that, you could potentially
eliminate a viable candidate from the next rounds of ballot tabulations—even
though he is one of the two candidates in a multiple-member field with the
largest plurality of support. As one analyst says, the tactic is to “‘up-vote
your lesser-evil candidate and ‘bury’ your lesser-evil candidate’s most viable
opponent.”14

Jason Sorens, “The False Promise of Instant Runoff Voting,” CATO Unbound,
December 9, 2016,
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/12/09/jason-sorens/false-promise-instant-runoff-voting
(accessed August 17, 2019). Sorens argues that ranked choice voting is worse
than “the status quo because it neuters third parties” by eliminating their
“blackmail power.” Under our current system, Sorens contends, major parties have
“an incentive to cater a bit to ideological minorities” to avoid those third
parties fielding a candidate in a race that will take votes away from the major
party candidate.

While this might sound farfetched, in today’s social media world, it would not
seem that difficult to implement and coordinate such a strategy, particularly in
local elections where there is a much smaller electorate. It is easy to imagine
sophisticated insiders and campaign consultants creating and employing such a
strategy to reach their candidate’s supporters and voters for second-, third-,
or fourth-round recalculations of voting results.

THE SOLUTION: RUNOFF ELECTIONS

The answer to this gimmickry is runoff elections. In the normal electoral
process in the vast majority of states, there is a runoff election several weeks
after a general election in which no candidate won a majority of the vote.

It is true that some voters might not turn out for a runoff election that is
held several weeks after the general election because their preferred candidate
did not gather enough votes to be in the runoff. However, the added time window
gives potential voters the opportunity to reexamine and reeducate themselves
about the character and views on issues of the two candidates who received the
largest pluralities in the general election. Voters have a greater opportunity
to make an informed choice than with instant runoffs (i.e., ranked choice
voting). Runoff elections guarantee that the winner of the runoff election has a
genuine mandate from a majority of the voters—a crucial factor in a democratic
system.

Runoff elections carry additional costs—but so do primary and general elections.
Yet few people suggest abolishing them because of their cost. Consent of the
governed matters.

Consent of the governed is what fosters domestic tranquility. When people
believe that elections produce clear results between known opposing ideas,
people learn to live with results even if they do not like the outcome. The vast
number of Americans who are perfectly comfortable with how elections have been
run for centuries will likely see ranked choice as a gimmick. When a body
politic comes to believe election outcomes are a gimmick, beware.

A few years ago, there was a movement to add “none of the above” to ballots in
some states. Ranked choice voting does the opposite—forcing voters who want to
have any say to vote for “all of the above.”

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

For over a decade, we have been warning about the people and institutions who
want to fundamentally transform our elections.15

See J. Christian Adams, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama
Justice Department (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011), and John Fund and
Hans von Spakovsky, Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote
at Risk (New York: Encounter Books, 2012).

You should pay close attention to, and be highly skeptical of, anyone who wants
to tinker with long-standing and revered electoral institutions, whether that is
the people controlling redistricting, voter registration, citizen-only voting,
or the Electoral College.

We have detected a pattern. Most of the time, when fundamental transformations
to elections are proposed, the people proposing them have two characteristics.
First, they think it will help their side win. Second, their ideological
perspectives are usually rooted in a transformational extreme: They want to
change the rules to manipulate elections outcomes in order to force the public
into their distorted vision of a supposedly utopian society.

Foes of the Electoral College, for example, want to undo it because they want
large, densely populated cities with their one-party control over election
administration determining who becomes the President of the United States. Foes
of legislatures drawing district lines oppose the people having control over the
process because they want friendly bureaucrats who sit on “independent”
redistricting commissions and who are unaccountable to voters drawing lines
instead.

CONCLUSION

In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the
American people and for preserving our great republic. So-called reformers want
to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain
power.

Ranked choice voting is no different.

Hans A. von Spakovsky is Senior Legal Fellow and Manager of the Election Law
Reform Initiative in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies,
on the Institute for Constitutional Government, at The Heritage Foundation and
co-author of Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at
Risk and Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department. J. Christian Adams
is President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the
author of Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.

Show References
[1]

[2]

David Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3? Not So Fast, Critics Say,”
Associated Press, October 9, 2016,
https://apnews.com/62c997cfd2ab403ca0b3c3333e1a9312 (accessed August 17, 2019).

[3]

[4]

Ibid., p. 42 (emphasis in original).

[5]

Waxman, “Ranked-Choice Voting Is Not the Solution.”

[6]

Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3?”

[7]

[8]

Ibid., at 131.

[9]

[10]

Burnett and Kogan, “Ballot and Voter ‘Exhaustion’ Under Instant Runoff Voting,”
p. 49.

[11]

Ibid.

[12]

Ibid., p. 44.

[13]

[14]

[15]

AUTHORS

Hans von Spakovsky

Election Law Reform Initiative Manager, Senior Legal Fellow

J. Adams

President and General Counsel, Public Interest Legal Foundation

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