Will Winsor
Alaska voters were surprised a few weeks back to find that two candidates running for the U.S. Senate – a longtime incumbent and an unknown outsider – purported to share the exact same name (the latter tried to run under a different middle initial, presumably to confuse voters). The more perceptive among them were doubtless reminded of Alaska’s last election for U.S. House, which featured a candidate serving a twenty-year prison sentence who had never even visited Alaska.
Why all these dirty election tricks that have plagued the Last Frontier? A recent Wall Street Journal article says to look no further than Alaska’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system that “encourages these shenanigans” by allowing numerous candidates on the same ballot in an intentionally confusing process. While Florida was ahead of the curve (per usual) in banning ranked choice voting in 2022, RCV enthusiasts have seen recent victories from DC to Hawaii and are hoping to ride their momentum into the South.
Ranked choice voting is a trendy election reform in which, rather than choosing one’s favorite among a few candidates, a voter must rank each candidate (often from a very large pool) from most to least favorite. After each “round,” the candidate with the least support is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to each of that former candidate’s voters’ second options. The process continues until a candidate has over 50% of votes, at which point he or she is deemed the victor.
Many who support RCV do so with good intentions, persuaded by activists who gush about a more representative democracy in which the winning candidate always receives over 50% of votes. Other RCV advocates dream of some idyllic future where candidates, desirous of second-place votes from supporters of their thwarted rivals, shy away from bashing opponents. Unfortunately, RCV actually does far more to undermine elections than it does to improve them.
Noble as it may seem to promote a kinder brand of politics with a broader appeal, these quixotic RCV initiatives promise progress and deliver only greater obstacles to voters, further atrophy of election confidence, and mysteriously successful candidates no one seems to have wanted. Florida must continue to steer clear of these dangerous proposals.
It feels almost shallow to criticize RCV simply for being too complicated, but if voters are confused at the ballot box (and they are), then that should immediately give pause to any sincere supporter of the reform. One of RCV’s greatest flaws is that its complicated nature dramatically increases the likelihood of exhausted ballots – ballots in which the voter failed to rank each candidate and are therefore not counted after the elimination of that voter’s preferred candidate(s). In many cases, the confused voter only votes for one candidate (like he or she always has), and the ballot is therefore not counted in later rounds of voting.
The dangers of exhausted ballots are far from hypothetical. A brief from the Maine Policy Center found that 11% of ballots across 96 RCV races were exhausted and did not factor into the final results. And a 2015 case study showed that exhausted ballots impacted the winners of four RCV elections: though the winners received over 50% of nonexhausted votes, none actually received over 50% of total votes cast; therefore, RCV’s object of majority rule wasn’t actually accomplished.
Not only is RCV more complicated for voters, but it is inarguably more complicated for elections administrators. Since it’s so reliant on computers, RCV is nearly impossible to audit or issue recounts for. In an election with a dozen candidates, ascertaining who got ninth and who got tenth can be a nightmare, and tiny counting errors matter a ton. A small computer failure in a Bay Area RCV race gave victory to the wrong candidate, and similar errors throughout the country are much harder to verify than in normal elections.
RCV elections also take much longer to count than standard elections, since every ballot needs to be in before computers go on to “round two.” In Alaska, the second round of vote counting doesn’t even start until 15 days after Election Day when all absentee ballots are counted in the first round. In an age where skepticism about election integrity runs high, an election that takes a minimum of two weeks to count feels foolish. Public confidence in elections is essential to republican principles like consent of the governed, but RCV shrouds an already convoluted system in even greater mystery.
Perhaps most importantly, the fundamental principle behind RCV – victorious candidates have a majority appeal – simply doesn’t hold water: assenting to a candidate is not the same as liking one. It is easy to imagine a crowded election where a candidate with 15-20% support leapfrogs over two others with higher support for the win with enough second-place votes. Advocates of RCV might herald this situation as one in which everyone is happy, but might it be closer to the truth to say that no one is?
The most widely reported RCV race, a 2022 special election for Alaska’s spot in the U.S. House, gave victory to Democrat Mary Peltola even as 60% of Alaskans voted Republican. It’s hard to cast this as a win for democracy, especially in yet another election fraught with exhausted ballots and confused voters.
No system of voting can be completely perfect, but RCV is just not even close. Encouraging “nicer” candidates (read: more surrogate hit pieces) and making elections cheaper (in the few states with runoff elections) is not worth confusing voters, spitting out undersupported victors, and adding to speculation about election interference. Florida must stay vigilant to avoid falling into the RCV trap that is always around the corner.
Will Winsor is a policy intern at The James Madison Institute and a junior at Hillsdale College.
