Ranked Choice Voting Initiatives Massively Fail
Initiatives related to ranked choice voting in political primaries and general elections were on the ballots in eight states and the District of Columbia. On the ballots were also an initiative that would repeal ranked choice voting (RCV) and restore plurality elections in Alaska, and to prohibit ranked choice voting in Missouri.
RCV lets voters rank candidates for political office by preference instead of choosing just one. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who picked the eliminated candidate as their top choice have their votes transferred to their next preference. This process repeats, eliminating the lowest-ranked candidates and redistributing votes, until one candidate achieves a majority.
First-past-the-post plurality party primaries exacerbate political polarization because candidates are generally chosen by each party’s base consisting of relatively few but highly ideological voters. This setup pushes candidates to adopt more extreme positions to gain favor with primary voters.
Proponents of RCV argue that it helps ensure the winner has broad support and allows voters to express multiple preferences, creating a more representative outcome in multicandidate races.
Cato Institute scholar Walter Olson argued in 2021 that RCV “should hold a lot of attraction, I believe, for those of us with libertarian views.” Why? Because libertarians, he observes, “tend to be aware that the so-called political spectrum does a poor job of capturing important facts about candidates; the ones we recognize as best (or worst) on matters of liberty and the rule of law do not necessarily line up neatly along a party spectrum. For libertarians, as for other groups, RCV respects and incorporates the complexity of actual voter preferences.”
Federal courts have consistently ruled that RCV does not violate federal constitutional and statutory requirements with respect to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equal protection under the law. Specifically, courts have found that RCV in primaries and general elections does not violate political parties’ free speech rights because it neither limits parties’ ability to express their positions nor restricts their freedom to support chosen candidates. RCV simply changes the mechanics of how votes are counted without suppressing party messaging or candidate competition.
While not all the votes have yet been counted, ranked choice voting appears to have been strongly rejected by voters in nine states. Only voters in Washington, D.C., chose to adopt RCV.
Let’s take a look at the results.
Arizona Propositions 133 and 140: The first would amend the
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