When Sarah Palin announced her bid to run for an open Congressional seat in Alaska in 2022, her candidacy seemed like a slam dunk. She was a leading conservative spokesperson and had celebrity status from her 2008 vice-presidential run. The seat had opened up when longtime Republican Congressmember Don Young died in March of that year. But when the dust settled and all the votes were counted, Palin lost by a three-point margin. Democrat Mary Peltola won, becoming the first Alaska Native person to serve in Congress.
Palin was quick to assign blame. In 2020, Alaska voters had passed a statewide ballot initiative setting up ranked choice voting (RCV) for state and federal offices. “It’s bizarre, it’s convoluted, it’s confusing, and it results in voter suppression,” said Palin. She implied she would have won the seat under the traditional electoral system.
Donald Trump also chimed in, calling the voting system “a totally rigged deal.”
Yet voters in four states this year, plus the District of Columbia, will be voting on various versions of RCV. And if they pass, that could turbocharge the RCV movement and shake up the political establishment.
Under the present system in most states, voters choose only one candidate in the primary and one in the general elections. Under RCV, voters can rank their votes in order of preference—first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on, based on the number of candidates.
When all of the first place votes are tallied, if any candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, that candidate is declared the winner.
If no candidate receives 50 percent of first place votes, then votes for the lowest-placed candidate are reassigned to the second choice of these voters.
If a candidate still does not have a majority of the votes, the process is repeated, with the votes of the second-lowest polling candidate assigned to the next choice of those voters. This is repeated until one candidate receives a majority of the vote.
“We support ranked choice voting because we are seeing that it works in practice. Ranked choice voting gives voters more choices,” Deb Otis, director of research and policy for FairVote, tells The Progressive. FairVote is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing voting reforms that make democracy more functional.
“It delivers winners with more broad support because you need majority support to win, rather than just support from a niche base of voters,” Otis continues. “It has been shown to improve representation for women and people of color. We are seeing these benefits across the country in places that use it.”
Backers believe that there is momentum behind the proposal. Advocates say RCV will be offered to the largest number of voters in this election cycle than in any previous one.
“The last record we had for the number of RCV measures on the ballot was two. We have more than doubled it this time.” David O’Brien, policy director for Represent.us., told The Progressive.
Represent.us describes itself as a nonpartisan, anti-corruption organization fighting to make government more responsive.
Broadly speaking, there are two basic models RCV supporters are pushing forward. There is the Alaska model, which uses the initiative passed by that state’s voters as the template. Described as an open, or all-candidate primary, voters chose the top four or five candidates to advance to the second, final, runoff.This primary is open to candidates from all parties, be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green. In the second round, RCV is used to determine the final winner through vote reallocation.
In 2016, votes cast in Michigan and Wisconsin for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein exceeded the winning margin for Donald Trump. Had an RCV system been in place, Hillary Clinton might have won both states—and perhaps the presidency—if enough Stein voters picked Clinton as their second choice.
Then there is the Maine model, passed in 2016 by Maine voters, where the parties determine their nominees in closed primaries (contests only open to party members and unaffiliated voters, but not members of other parties). Then, the winners of the respective primaries would advance to the general election where the winner would also be decided by vote reallocation.
In 2020, in one hotly contested Massachusetts Democratic Congressional primary, the winner drew slightly more than 22 percent of the vote. He was considered the most conservative candidate in the field, with the more progressive candidates splitting the rest of the vote. Under a Maine model of RCV, there is a good chance that the splintered progressive vote would have been reallocated to another candidate who could have emerged as the ultimate winner.
The current Oregon ballot initiative is modeled after Maine’s. The Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado measures are modeled after Alaska’s. “The nice thing about ranked choice voting is that it can be adapted to fit the needs of the individual state,” says Otis.
But there has been considerable pushback against the idea.
Alaska has a November ballot initiative that would repeal the RCV measure passed in 2022. It is largely led by state Republicans stung by Palin’s defeat.
Republicans in Missouri placed a measure on their ballot banning all localities from adopting the voting system. The governor of Alabama recently signed a bill into law that also bans localities from instituting RCV.
Opposition is not only coming from the right wing of the Republican Party. The Washington, D.C., Democratic Party has strongly come out against a local RCV initiative.
“A big electoral change like RCV is bound to generate a lot of opposition from people who are already in office . . . [because] you are changing the process by which they got elected,” said O’Brien.
Others go even further.
“The bottom line is that ranked choice voting helps break the establishment’s grip on power,” says Ellen Moorhouse, former deputy communications director of Represent.us.
Opponents have two main arguments against RCV. One is that the measure is too confusing for voters. The other is that because voters often pick just one candidate, and don’t rank all the choices they could, that is effectively disenfranchising their votes.
While some advocates concede that there may be confusion when voters first use the system, they maintain that once voters get used to it, they become strongly supportive.
In 2019, New York City passed ranked choice voting for mayoral and city council elections. Advocates cite broad popular support to rebut claims that voters will be confused by the system.
“Ninety-five percent of [NYC] voters found the [RCV] ballot simple to complete,” says Otis. “77 percent of voters supported continuing the use of ranked choice voting in future elections. What other issue has 77 percent support?”
Advocates strongly disagree with the idea that RCV will disenfranchise voters.
“Sometimes voters will choose to not rank every candidate,” O’Brien says. “That is up to them. The idea is not to force voters to rank every candidate. I don’t see that as disenfranchising anyone.”
Given the probable closeness of this year’s elections, plus the presence of third-party candidates on the ballot, should the RCV systems in place in Maine and Alaska run smoothly, then, Otis predicts, voters in other states will develop a bad case of “election envy.”
Political momentum and election envy may well combine to jump-start the RCV movement post-November.