The DNC Discovers the Perils of ‘Election Reform’

T he Democratic National Committee meets on August 15, and on the agenda is a ban on ranked-choice voting (RCV) in the Democrats’ 2028 presidential primaries. This is causing an understandable uproar, since progressive and socialist Democrats are the ones pushing RCV around the country. The DNC would be right to take a stand against it, since RCV — like many other “election reforms” — makes the election process more difficult, less meaningful, and harder to trust.

In our regular “first-past-the-post” elections, each voter casts one vote for one candidate for each office. This is “one person, one vote.” It’s also simple addition: Add up everyone’s votes and the candidate with the most votes wins. Yet, even in this system, where ballots are easy to mark and count, people can and often do make mistakes and question results.

The DNC has good reason to worry about complex election procedures and decreased transparency. Its 2020 Iowa caucus debacle led to multiple Democrats claiming victory as it took weeks to decipher the final results. The DNC had hoped to “reform” the caucuses to allow remote participation, but the added complexity depended on unproven technology even as it diminished transparency. When it broke down, it damaged the DNC’s credibility and voters’ trust in the process.

Ranked-choice voting would be even worse. It makes every step of the election process more complex and difficult. Ballots are longer, contain more instructions, and ask voters to rank multiple candidates for each office, which makes voting slower and lines longer.

With RCV, rankings are counted in rounds, with adjustments in between. First-place rankings are counted, and if no candidate has a majority, then the candidate with the fewest first-place rankings is eliminated. On ballots where an eliminated candidate was ranked first, the next-ranked candidate is “moved up” to become the first-place ranking in the next round of counting. This can happen again and again.

Ranked-choice vote-counting ends when a candidate has a majority of real and adjusted first-place rankings on the remaining ballots. This is often less than a majority of the voters who participated because of “ballot exhaustion.” If voters decline to rank all candidates, and their candidates are eliminated, RCV excludes them from the final results — essentially throwing away those ballots.

Those pushing RCV claim it guarantees majority winners. This is false, not only because of ballot exhaustion, but also because it pretends that a second, third, or fourth choice is the same as a first choice.

What ranked-choice voting does is turn supporters of fringe candidates into kingmakers. A voter who backs a leading candidate may have the same first-place ranking counted in every round. But a voter who initially supports an extreme candidate with little chance of winning can help decide the contest between the finalists when that voter’s later ranking is moved up the list. In a close race, those transferred rankings can determine the winner.

This is likely what DNC members fear: an election process that encourages supporting candidates who cannot win and gives more power to the most extreme voters.

Politics is complicated enough. The “KISS principle” should guide election policy: Keep It Simple, Stupid. RCV adds complexity to every step in the process. It relies on technology to adjust and even eliminate ballots within a “black box” that most voters cannot verify, and it delivers slower results.

Perhaps this is why 19 states have laws banning RCV in their elections. It is used in 15 states, but mostly just in city and town elections. Only Alaska and Maine use it in statewide general elections, and Alaskans will vote this November on whether to repeal the law that allows it.

The DNC deserves credit if it stands up to its RCV-supporting fringe. More importantly, rejecting ranked-choice voting will help ensure that its 2028 primaries do not descend into Iowa-like chaos. Voters, in both primary and general elections, deserve simple, verifiable elections they can trust.