Who exactly are the winners of this new and confusing electoral system called ranked-choice voting (RCV)? It’s not the thousands of voters that show up to the polls in RCV elections only to have their votes thrown out. The winners of RCV are partisans and special interests who use the system’s design to manipulate election outcomes and undermine states’ efforts to safeguard election integrity.
Take also Alaska, the most recent example. In the 2022 special election to fill the seat of the late Congressman Don Young, nearly 15,000 Alaskan votes were tossed out before the Democrat Mary Peltola was declared the winner. In fact, 60 percent of voters voted Republican in the first round, but by the last tally, Peltola came out ahead by just 5,129 votes. Conveniently for the Democrats, more than 11,000 ballots were exhausted—or tossed—by the second round simply because they only voted for the other Republican candidate instead of ranking all of the candidates.
If this sounds unfair, it’s because it is.
For all of our electoral history, candidates have been elected by a plurality of votes. Yet, RCV now requires a candidate to receive a majority of votes in order to be declared the winner. But the only way to create that majority is by systematically removing ballots from the final tally. If voters don’t rank every candidate—even those they would absolutely never support—they risk having their vote being removed from the final vote count. This is because even if a voter’s first choice earned the most votes in the first round, by the second, third, fourth, and subsequent rounds, that candidate—and the voter’s ballot—could be eliminated, as if the voter never showed up to the polls. Even in a runoff election, which is what RCV seeks to prevent, voters are given another chance to choose between candidates.
RCV therefore creates a fake majority, not a true majority. Not only does this fly in the face of our American principles of “one-person, one-vote,” it allows candidates to effectively “fail-up” to beat the candidate that had the most votes in the first round.
If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is.
Is it reasonable to think that voters will be adequately educated on every single candidate to rank each of them? Yet this is the burden placed on voters under the RCV system. And voters must comply with it, or risk having their vote thrown out.
Americans win when their votes count. One-person, one-vote, and we should keep it that way.