Ranked choice voting draws interest from right
Method long loved by left may be moving past ‘guilt by association’
Long viewed as an intriguing, if somewhat wonky, approach to conducting elections, ranked choice voting — allowing voters to list candidates in order of preference instead of selecting just one — appears to be having a moment.
Across the country, voters have adopted the system for municipal and county elections in each of the last 27 times the issue has been put to them. Nevada and Oregon — and perhaps Colorado and Idaho as well — will hold referendums on adopting the system this fall. Maine and Alaska already have adopted it, as has the city of Santa Fe.
Proponents say ranked choice reduces polarization by forcing candidates to seek broad support, and that it allows voters to support minor or protest candidates without them becoming spoilers. Critics call the system confusing and even undemocratic, since candidates who initially get the most firstplace votes don’t always win in the end.
But just how popular ranked choice voting is may depend on the group that has most often waged tooth-and-claw battles against it: conservatives, and in particular Republican political figures, who have ideological and practical reasons to oppose the system.
The Republican National Committee urged Congress and the states a year ago to oppose ranked choice voting “in every locality and level of government.” Republican-run legislatures in Kansas and Georgia are considering bills to outlaw it. When a coalition of advocacy groups began mobilizing last year to place a ranked choice initiative on the ballot in Idaho, the GOP supermajority in the Legislature preemptively banned it.
At least a few Republicans say they see cracks in that opposition. Whether they’re right could determine if ranked choice voting, also known as instant runoffs, could have a future beyond largely Democratic enclaves.
A measure that would repeal the Idaho ban and institute a modified form of ranked choice voting is within a few thousand signatures of reaching the November ballot, with the backing of scores of Republican political figures led by former Gov. Butch Otter. In solidly red Utah, 21 cities — including the capital, Salt Lake City — have held ranked choice elections since 2021. Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature held a hearing on the system last month, with testimony from both Republican and Democratic supporters. “A lot of it is guilt by association,” said John Pudner, a Wisconsin Republican and president of Take Back Our Republic Action, which describes itself as a center-right nonprofit focused on election rules. “When people say, ‘San Francisco did this, and Seattle did it, and New York did it,’ the assumption is that if the other side is doing something, it’s probably bad for you,” he said.
Pudner said that he opposed unlimited ranked choice ballots but that some conservatives, like him, favor a modified system that doesn’t ask voters to rank more than five candidates. “It’s picking up steam,” he said. “I hear more and more people talking about it at Republican meetings around the country.”
Indeed, Virginia Republicans used ranked choice voting in 2021 to select Glenn Youngkin, who defeated six opponents and went on to become the first Republican governor in the state in more than a decade. The party stuck with ranked choice the next year, saying that the method would elevate “the candidate with the broadest base of support.”
Critics — not all of them conservatives — call the system confusing and even undemocratic, given that the person who wins a plurality of the vote in a multicandidate contest may not end up the winner. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a liberal Democrat, vetoed legislation that would have expanded the use of ranked choice elections.
Some Republicans who oppose ranked choice elections say that the system erodes faith in the results because it can take days to determine winners, though advances in software and high-speed ballot scanning can reduce those delays to hours. And some in a party moving steadily to the right don’t believe Republicans benefit from an electoral system billed as diminishing the prospects of candidates with extreme political views.
Proposals in Nevada, Colorado and Idaho would scrap party primary races in favor of a single open primary; the top four or five finishers would advance to the general election.