By a margin of just 737 votes out of 340,078 cast, Alaska voters chose to keep their ranked choice voting system this year. This was the lone victory for a movement that saw losses in eight other states despite heavily outspending opponents. The empty promises of the ranked choice voting movement are being exposed, its costs are mounting, and voters are wisely choosing to reject this fundamentally undemocratic premise.
Advocates of ranked choice voting claim the system makes it easier for more centrist candidates with broader support to win over more “extreme” candidates who they claim benefit from low-turnout primaries. Ranked choice voting advocates, who happen to be almost entirely composed of Democrats, also claim that ranked choice voting discourages negative campaigning since candidates are forced to appeal to a wider spectrum of voters.
There is no empirical evidence any of this is true.
Just look at Oakland, California, where Mayor Sheng Thao, endorsed and funded generously by public sector unions, outspent centrist opponent Loren Taylor, who won on the first ballot. Only after multiple rounds of recounting ballots, which is a necessity of the ranked choice voting system, did Thao finally come out on top. The whole process took weeks, delaying governmental transition and undermining faith in electoral integrity.
And what did Oakland voters get with their public union-funded ranked choice-voted winner? A corrupt incompetent who is now under federal indictment and has since been recalled by voters. So much for wise moderation.
A more fundamental problem with ranked choice voting is its inherently undemocratic nature. Voters should not be forced to vote for candidates they don’t want to vote for. But the entire premise of ranked choice voting depends on forcing people to vote for candidates they don’t want to. Otherwise, voters with little preference between candidates are given more votes than those who don’t.
Consider a voter who only likes one candidate in a race and does not want to vote for any of the other four candidates. So that voter votes for just his favorite candidate, leaving the other four lines blank. If that voter’s candidate does not survive the first round, he has voted once. But another voter who was apathetic between the candidates and ranked all five got to vote in every round of the ranked choice runoff, effectively giving him five votes to the other voter’s one vote. This is inherently undemocratic since it violates the Supreme Court’s standard of “one person, one vote.”
This is not as uncommon an outcome as ranked choice proponents would have you believe. In 2019, for example, the San Francisco mayor’s race lasted nine rounds, with just 46% of ballots filling out enough candidates to make it all nine rounds. As a result, Mayor London Breed was elected from a majority of just 115,977 final eligible ballots compared to the 254,106 that were originally cast. Voters were apparently unhappy with this result as well since Breed lost reelection handily last month.
Despite this well-established track record of failure, ranked choice advocates spent more than $110 million in nine states pushing their wasteful democratic voting system on voters. And the voters of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and South Dakota all rejected the ranked choice nonsense. Figures for ranked choice opponents for all states are not in, but in Colorado alone, ranked choice advocates spent $14.6 million compared to just half a million dollars spent by ranked choice opponents.
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It is understandable why Democratic Party activists are looking for some neat trick to deliver competent governance magically. Oakland, San Francisco, New York City, and many other Democratic-controlled localities desperately need better leadership. But ranked choice voting is not the answer. Just look at Fairfax, where the Democratic mayor is calling for ranked choice voting precisely because it well helped protect incumbents from unhappy voters who want to hold them accountable for their bad decisions.
If Democrats want better governance in the cities and states they run, a better solution would be to end collective bargaining privileges for public unions. Now that would allow for new and centrist voices to emerge.