The Welcome Demise of Ranked-Choice Voting

O n Tuesday, Donald Trump secured his comeback to the White House. But Tuesday should also be remembered as the day that ranked-choice voting died — except in Washington, D.C., where bad ideas live in perpetuity.

Alaskans voted on Tuesday on whether or not to repeal the state’s ranked-choice voting system. In 2020, Alaskans approved a 25-page initiative promising a better elections process and the elimination of “dark money” influence in campaigns. The initiative, financed by national progressive advocacy groups under the banner of Alaskans for Better Elections, passed by a margin of about 3,700 votes. Maine has used ranked-choice voting in statewide elections since 2016.

In Alaska’s version of ranked-choice voting, the four candidates receiving the most votes advance from a choose-one nonpartisan primary. If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-place votes, he or she wins; if no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, counting proceeds in rounds in which the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters whose highest-choice preference was eliminated have their vote transferred to their next-highest preference.

When Don Young died in 2022, Alaskans were flung into a special election. Forty-eight candidates entered the primary, and the top four advanced to the general election, though only after some legal jockeying to determine whether the fifth-place candidate could replace a candidate that had dropped out. Two Republicans split their first-choice votes, tallying 60 percent together, and therefore the “consensus” candidate, Mary Peltola (D., Alaska), won.

A simple process with a simple outcome, right? Not quite. Millions spent on education efforts by state agencies failed to assuage mass confusion. What’s worse is that official Division of Elections resources instructed voters to “rank as many or as few candidates as you would like.” That puts voters without second, third, or fourth-place preferences at a disadvantage, thanks to ballot exhaustion. If all of a voter’s ranked candidates are eliminated before the final round of counting, it’s as if that voter didn’t show up at all.

Ballot exhaustion means that a candidate doesn’t need a majority of all votes cast to win. In 96 ranked-choice voting races across the country, the eventual winner failed to receive a true majority 61 percent of the time. Confusion predictably decreases voter turnout, especially among black and white voters, younger voters, and voters who lack a high-school education.

Evidence is also mounting against the claims of progressive cheerleaders like FairVote that ranked-choice voting “mitigates vote-splitting,” “minimizes strategic voting,” and reduces “political polarization.” Ranked-choice voting has exacerbated fears of vote-splitting, at least in Alaska. In the 2024 election for Alaska’s sole representative in Congress, Alaskans essentially engineered a head-to-head contest between Democrat Mary Peltola and Nick Begich, a Republican. The third-place candidate, Republican lieutenant governor Nancy Dahlstrom, was pressured to drop out, and did so, to avoid splitting the Republican votes like last time.

Voters must also think strategically to avoid creating counterintuitive results. “Counterintuitive” describes Alaska’s 2022 special election well: Nick Begich, the third-place Republican candidate, would actually have beaten both Mary Peltola and Sarah Palin in head-to-head contests. Begich ran the most centrist campaign and was preferred to both Palin and Peltola by a majority of voters. A working paper by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute simulated ranked-choice elections across all 50 states and concluded that the system “tends to produce winning candidates who are more divergent ideologically from their state’s median voter” and “the effect is most pronounced in the most polarized states.”

In 2024, many Alaskans are still furious. With 76 percent of the vote counted as of Wednesday morning, Ballot Measure 2, for the repeal of ranked-choice voting, has pulled ahead narrowly, 51 percent to 49 percent. Two percentage points may seem small, but it’s a wider margin than the one point that originally installed ranked-choice voting.

It’s still too early to call, but it’s a testament to ranked choice’s unpopularity that a flood of out-of-state donations haven’t defeated repeal efforts entirely. Opponents of repeal raised a staggering $14 million against a mere $150,000 for supporters. The “citizen-led” campaign names their top three contributors as left-leaning Unite America, of Denver; Article IV, of Arlington, Va; and the Action Now Initiative, of Houston.

Opponents of repeal flooded Alaska’s tiny media market, winning support from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska). A mysterious group called the Conservative Majority Fund claimed in ads that “smart conservatives” will vote to keep ranked-choice voting because it helps to elect conservatives. Ads falsely suggested that veterans would be “forced to join a political party in order to vote for the candidate we want.”

Is this how ranked-choice voting “positively changes the culture of our politics?” If so, I’ll pass.

Nevada seemed poised to be next. Nevada’s Question 3, which would institute nonpartisan primaries with the top five candidates advancing to the general election, initially won in 2022, with 52.9 percent of the vote. However, to modify the state’s constitution, it needed to be approved again on Tuesday. The Nevada Voters First PAC, funded by the usual suspects, raised $22.9 million in 2022 and $19.9 million to support it this time around. Yet Nevadans voted against Question 3, with 54.4 percent of the vote and increased turnout on both sides.

Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon all rejected ranked-choice voting, too. It wasn’t even close in Idaho, where 70 percent voted against Proposition 1 to implement a top-four open primary with ranked-choice voting general elections. Montana’s constitutional initiatives, or CI 126 and CI 127, failed, with 51.9 percent and 61 percent voting no, respectively. Had they passed, it would’ve been up to the legislature to decide how to ensure candidates win more than 50 percent of the vote. Ranked-choice voting or runoffs would have been likely choices, each with its own problems.

Even Colorado and Oregon, whose electoral votes went for Kamala Harris, rejected Proposition 131 and Measure 117, with 55.2 percent and 59.6 percent of the vote, respectively. Missouri voters proactively approved a constitutional amendment to prohibit ranked-choice voting by 68 percent. The only jurisdiction excited about ranked choice on Tuesday was Washington, D.C., which approved I-83, with 72.7 percent, and gave Harris 93 percent of the presidential vote.

D.C. could use political depolarization and “consensus” candidates, but it’s going about it the wrong way. Ranked-choice voting has delivered Alaska only confusing ballots, hushed backroom dealings, long waits for results, and worsened polarization. Too bad the Beltway doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons from Alaska’s experience.

Here lies ranked-choice voting, buried 2024.