Ballot measures to decide if ranked choice voting expands to D.C., four states

The ranked-choice voting movement has been rocked by defeats for two years as Republican-led states enact bans on the quirky vote-counting process, but proponents have ample opportunity to reverse their fortunes on Nov. 5.

Four states and the District of Columbia have ballot initiatives to enact ranked-choice voting rather than keeping the standard plurality system in top-line elections. Voters would be asked to rank candidates, and those rankings would determine a winner if nobody captures a majority.

Only Alaska, Hawaii and Maine now use ranked-choice voting for state and federal races, but that number could increase if supporters run the table in the Nov. 5 elections.

“Any of the four states where RCV is on the ballot — Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, or Oregon — would become the most populous state to adopt the reform,” said FairVote, which advocates for ranked-choice voting.

“Washington, D.C., and three other cities will also vote on adopting RCV, which has now won 27 city ballot measures in a row,” the group said.

The movement also could lose ground on Election Day. Alaska’s Measure 2 would repeal ranked-choice voting just four years after voters approved the system. The Missouri ballot features Amendment 7, a constitutional ban on ranked-choice voting.

Maine became the first state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential general election in 2020. Maine and Alaska will use the system for the presidential election this year. Hawaii uses ranked choice in special federal and local elections but won’t be using it this year for the presidential election.

The Oregon and D.C. ballot measures include ranked-choice voting for the presidential general election, while those in Colorado, Idaho and Nevada do not.

The ranked-choice voting system was banned in 10 Republican-led states, starting with Tennessee and Florida in 2022, because of concerns about ballot complexity, reduced electoral transparency and diminished confidence in elections.

“The RCV pitch claims it will ensure candidates win true electoral majorities, but the RCV ‘majority’ is only created by tossing out ballots and redistributing votes to other candidates,” said the Honest Elections Project, part of the Stop RCV coalition of conservative organizations.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters typically rank their top four or five candidates. If no candidate receives 50% of the first-place vote, the race is decided by an “instant runoff.” The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and their votes are reallocated.

The process is repeated until a candidate wins a majority of votes cast.

Deb Otis, FairVote director of research and policy, said the result is that “voters get real choices, parties get stronger nominees, and candidates need a majority to win. It’s a win-win solution, and that’s why it’s become the fastest-growing voting reform in the nation.”

Critics say the system is a recipe for confusion.

In Alameda County, California, the registrar’s office acknowledged that it certified the wrong winner for a school board seat after incorrectly configuring the ranked-choice algorithm in the November 2022 elections. A third-party audit caught the error more than a month later.

In 2018, RCV was seen as a trendy new election system spreading across the country. Now, it’s viewed as a convoluted scheme with bipartisan opposition.

Things change. https://t.co/6zXlKwkmUP

— Stop RCV (@Stop_RCV) October 20, 2024

Republicans have long viewed ranked-choice voting with suspicion, given that the movement is bankrolled by left-of-center funds such as Arnold Ventures, Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation, though Democrats have also raised objections.

In the District, the local Democratic Party leads the opposition to Initiative 83. The party opposes allowing independents to vote in Democratic primaries and says the initiative would “cause our party’s values and goals to be diluted.”

Philip Pannell, treasurer of the Yes on 83 campaign, said that increasing access to Democratic primaries “actually expands democracy and would help the parties.”

“Currently, there are only nine states and the District of Columbia that still have closed primaries,” said Mr. Pannell. “The Democratic Party does not help itself when it does not reach out to embrace independents.”

Colorado Democrats are genuinely split. Gov. Jared Polis and Sen. John Hickenlooper support Proposition 131, but the Colorado Democratic Party and Sen. Michael F. Bennet lead the opposition.

“Prop 131 would replace Colorado’s election system with a very complicated form of ranked-choice voting,” Mr. Bennet said in a statement. “Much of the discussion about how this system would function is based on theory and guesses — and Colorado, with its excellent existing system and strong voter turnout, should not be the guinea pig for this billionaire-backed experiment.”

Indeed, the ranked-choice movement has an enormous financial advantage. In Alaska, the Measure 2 repeal initiative has been outspent by a ratio of more than 24-to-1.

Proponents of ranked-choice voting also hope to claw back some state legislative losses by overriding recently approved bans in Idaho, Montana and South Dakota.

In Montana, two ballot measures don’t mention ranked-choice voting but would pave the way for the system. Constitutional Initiative 126 would establish a top-four open primary system, and Constitutional Initiative 127 would require a runoff system when no candidate wins a majority.

Phil Izon, who leads the Measure 2 repeal effort in Alaska, said reversals have become more of a feature than a bug of ranked-choice voting.

“The rate of repeal is over 90% historically for ranked-choice voting,” said Mr. Izon, who has written three manuals on the system. “It has been repealed 85 times in the United States since the 1920s. I believe that all of these measures will eventually be repealed at some point, including Oakland, California, which has used it for 14 years.”

From 2022 to 2024, “bans and repeals were adopted at a higher rate than new authorizations. In other words, there have been more RCV bans adopted in the last three years than new authorizations, despite half as many introduced bills,” Ballotpedia said in a July report.

Advocates cite surveys showing that voters who have used ranked choice, including in Alaska and Maine, “overwhelmingly like it and understand it.”

The group said 12 counties and cities, including Portland, Oregon, which will use the system for the first time, will use ranked-choice voting to determine the winners of the Nov. 5 elections.