Ranked Choice Voting is a Scam
It is just a way to disenfranchise voters while claiming to increase choice.
I originally wrote and posted this in October of 2021, the push in Utah and surrounding states to implement this is cranking up again as we head into the 2024 election season. It was a bad idea in 2021 and it is still a bad idea.
Please do not be fooled and please speak out, it is such a seemingly small issue that if people don’t get and stay aware, a powerful and vocal minority will speak for us all. Please read the Heritage Foundation report on this issue.
There is a constant push for ranked choice voting.
Don’t fall for it.
It’s a bad idea.
Supposedly it allows people to pick the best candidates through ranking them but as the former California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. (D) said in 2016 when he vetoed a bill to expand ranked choice voting in his state, it was “overly complicated and confusing” and “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.”
In 2019, Hans von Spakovsky wrote:
“Think about what ranked choice voting destroys. It destroys your clear and knowing choices as a political consumer. Let us call it the supermarket contemplation. In reality, you are choosing one elected official to represent you, just like you might choose one type of steak sauce to buy when you are splurging for steaks. At the supermarket you ponder whether to buy A1, Heinz 57, HP, or the really cheap generic brand you have never tried.
In the real world, you compare price, taste, mood, and maybe even the size of the bottle and then decide on your steak sauce. You know nothing about the generic brand, so you rank it last among your choices, while A1 is ranked a distant third. In your mind, it comes down to Heinz or HP, and you choose the Heinz. You buy that bottle and head home to the grill.
Now imagine if, instead, you had to rank-order all the steak sauces—even the ones you dislike—and at checkout the cashier swaps out your bottle of Heinz 57 with the cheap generic you ranked dead last. Why? Well, the majority of shoppers also down-voted it, but there was no clear front-runner, so the generic snuck up from behind with enough down ballot picks to win. In fact, in this ranked choice supermarket, you might even have helped the lousy generic brand win.”
Such a system would present many opportunities to rig the electoral system.
It also falls victim to something called ballot exhaustion.
Ballot exhaustion comes when none of your picks make it through the initial rounds. For example, many jurisdictions allow only three choices. Let’s say you only pick two and your two fall out in the first two rounds – your ballot is not counted – and it can (and does) lead to a candidate who does not win a majority of votes winning the elections.
It is a way to disenfranchise voters while claiming to increase choice.
No surprise the left loves this process.
In 2010, in the Oakland, California, mayoral race, the candidate who received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.
Spakovsky notes the same happened in Maine;
“In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates.”
I recall an election in Australia where the leftist Labor Party defeated a center-right coalition of Liberal-National parties in a battle for control of their government even though the Labor candidates only won 38% to 43% in the first round.
Alaska just used ranked choice in the special election to fill the open seat left by the death of Don Young. In that race, the Democrat ultimately won the seat, even though the Republican candidates combined had initially received roughly 59% of the vote.
Seems clear the people of Alaska supported the Republican platform, but got the Democrat instead.
Another significant issue is that it takes a long time to deliver the results, especially if it takes multiple rounds. It took Alaska 15 days to figure out who won that special election.
This is not a good idea.
Hold runoffs if necessary.
At least that way, people can know for whom they are voting and know when they cast a vote it is going to count.
I remember when RCV was new to Utah. Sure it was confusing, yet we embraced it. I’ve long since become disenchanted. Your piece lucidly explains the unintended consequences—unintended by the voters, that is. What is the *real* motivation behind the push to make RCV an indelible part of our election protocols?
From Alaska: the state et. al are running ads highlighting five ways you cannot vote without getting your ballot thrown out. That ain't how its supposed to be.