Ranked choice voting surged in popularity following a blockbuster midterm election cycle that saw Democrats win an outright majority in the United States Senate, but the race to embrace the often complicated system has produced mixed results, leaving some states and municipalities with buyer’s remorse.
Less than a year after giving ranked choice voting the green light, the Arlington County Board in Virginia decided this month to return to its former plurality voting system for the November general election.
HUNTER BIDEN INVESTIGATION: DOJ BACKS DEVON ARCHER TESTIFYING, REJECTS OBSTRUCTION CLAIMS
“This isn’t ‘no’ forever,” board Vice Chairwoman Libby Garvey said at a July meeting, acknowledging there were “real ramifications we haven’t wrestled with.”
The northern Virginia board adopted ranked choice voting in December, deployed it during the Democratic primary in June, and decided to scrap it a month later.
The primary was the first election in Virginia that used ranked choice voting and it became a highly-visible test case, though there were problems and confusion from the start. Six people were in the running and the two primary winners finished first and third in the initial round of counting. The number two candidate, Natalie Roy, also did well during the first count but was knocked out five rounds later, causing some voters to question the system and the importance of their vote.
“Maybe I don’t completely understand it,” Garvey admitted. “I do want to know how my vote counts.”
Under the ranked choice voting system, voters can pick candidates in order of preference. If no one candidate wins an outright majority, the candidate who got the fewest number of votes is eliminated and their votes are given to whomever the voters’ second choice was. The process continues until one candidate wins the majority and is crowned the winner.
RACE TO CHALLENGE SEN. SHERROD BROWN’S 2024 REELECTION BID GETS UNDERWAY
Supporters say the system accurately identifies the candidate with the strongest support, weeds out wasted votes, and eliminates the need for multiple, costly elections. They also argue it promotes civility.
“It’s very simple where the virtues come from,” said Rob Ritchie, president and CEO of FairVote, a national nonpartisan group that advocates for ranked choice voting. “If you’re limited to a single choice, your overt engagement with a field of candidates is limited to that single choice. If you become aligned with that single choice you stop thinking. But when you’re given the opportunity to consider multiple candidates, you’re expanding the number of reasons for engagement to happen, for conversations to happen.”
Critics claim the process is too complicated, too expensive, takes too long to declare a winner, benefits only one party, and violates the basic tenant of one person, one vote.
In Alaska, voters approved ranked choice voting in 2020, mandating that every candidate, regardless of party, would compete in the same primary, with the top four moving on to the general election. Following the March 2022 death of Rep. Don Young (R-AK), the state held a special election to fill his U.S. House seat. More than four dozen candidates were in the running and despite performing well in the first round of votes, former Gov. Sarah Palin lost to her Democratic rival Mary Peltola once the votes from the second and third rounds were factored in. Palin also lost in the November general election to Peltola for a full term.
Following the results, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed ranked choice voting, calling it a “scam.”
“60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won,'” Cotton wrote in a tweet.
60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat “won.”
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) September 1, 2022
Palin also criticized the system after losing, saying in a statement that it was a “mistake” that was originally “sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people.” But now, she said, Alaska and the rest of America see “the exact opposite is true.
“The people of Alaska do not want the destructive Democrat agenda to rule our land and our lives, but that’s what resulted from someone’s experiment with this new crazy, convoluted, confusing ranked choice voting system,” she said. “It’s effectively disenfranchised 60% of Alaska voters.”
Ranked choice voting, while new to some areas, has been around for more than 100 years. Ranked choice voting election laws were first adopted in 1912. Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, and Wisconsin used versions of it for their party primaries, though by 1930, each jurisdiction had replaced it. Today, it is used in Maine, Alaska, and 47 cities across the country. It’s also used by Indiana Republican parties in state conventions and primaries. Dozens of other states and counties have been considering switching to the system.
In Connecticut, a proposal to implement a ranked choice voting system cleared a key hurdle this year, going further in the legislative process than it has in years, while in Ohio, a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to ban it outright.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
State Sen. Theresa Gavarone pushed a proposal to ban ranked choice voting altogether and strip municipalities of their share of state funding if they tried to implement it anyway.
“Ranked choice voting flies in the face of what the founders of the country and those in Ohio had in mind when they established one vote, one voice model centuries ago,” she said.
