The left’s ranked-choice voting scheme to replace honest elections

By Jason Stead and Andy Jackson

What are we to think when voters nationwide repudiate a supposed election reform despite campaigns by deep-pocketed leftist organizations backing it?

This past fall, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon roundly rejected ballot measures that would have imposed ranked-choice voting (RCV) on their states. Missouri voters approved a ballot measure to ban RCV by a greater than 2-to-1 margin, and 10 other states have enacted laws prohibiting RCV.

The reason for the public rejection of RCV is apparent: It is a confusing scheme searching for a problem. As the name suggests, voters in an RCV election are tasked with ranking candidates in order of their preference. If no candidate clinches a majority of the vote, the winner is computed in a series of elimination rounds. The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is dropped, and each vote cast for him or her is redistributed to the voter’s next highest choice. This cumbersome process is repeated until one candidate wins a majority of the remaining votes.

Right off the bat, there is a fundamental problem: What if a voter does not rank every candidate, and his or her choices are eliminated before a winner is declared? Under RCV, those ballots are eliminated because they are deemed “exhausted.” “Disenfranchisement” would be a more accurate term since exhausted ballots are erased from the final results as if the voter had never bothered to vote. Analysis reveals this problem is extensive. In fact, the 2021 New York mayoral primary left roughly 140,000 ballots on the cutting room floor.

That’s just for starters. RCV elections are routinely marred by voting errors (which increase the risk of rejected ballots), lower turnout, delayed election results, longer lines at polling places, and complicated recounts. In a 2022 election, officials in Oakland, California, certified the wrong winner. The mistake nearly escaped detection, and in the end, it took four months and a lawsuit to seat the true victor.

Given those problems, it is hardly surprising that an MIT study found that “RCV produced significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use” for voters compared to the traditional plurality method that most states, including North Carolina, use.

The study also found that RCV increased the time to complete a ballot by almost 12 seconds per candidate in multi-candidate races. There were 21 statewide candidates in races with at least three candidates in North Carolina’s 2024 general election, meaning that RCV would increase the time it takes to vote by over four minutes per ballot. That is a recipe for longer lines and more drop-off (not voting for races down the ballot).

RCV’s track record shows it is a scheme intended to push politics to the left. When Maine shifted to RCV, Republican Congressman Bruce Poliquin lost his seat despite winning more first-place votes. In Alaska’s first RCV contest, the Republican congressional candidates won nearly 60% of first-choice votes, yet Democrat Mary Peltola wound up elected.

This is why ranked-choice voting has attracted enormous support from left-wing billionaires who are pouring money — lots of it — into efforts across the country to replace honest “one person, one vote” elections with RCV.

Liberal billionaire John Arnold and his wife Laura alone dumped an eye-popping $39 millioninto last year’s campaign to pass RCV ballot measures in states across America. RCV opponents were outspent 30-to-1 in those contests, making the universal rejection of RCV even more telling. Another pro-RCV organization, the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, is a spin-off of FairVote, whose funders include the Arnolds, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (as well as other Soros-connected foundations), and the notorious left-wing dark money group the Tides Foundation.

Another group underwriting efforts to expand RCV’s corrosive impact is Unite America. One of Unite America’s top funders is Kathryn Murdoch, who donates almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and campaign committees. Yet another major funder of RCV campaigns is former Obama fundraiser Katherine Gehl, who advocates a more comprehensive — and radical — change to elections called “final-five voting.”

RCV advocates also have an insider at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Before the Democratic-controlled board appointed Karen Brinson Bell as executive director, she was deputy director of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center.

North Carolinians deserve to know the truth about ranked-choice voting. It’s a system that upends the “one person, one vote” principle and replaces it with a partisan tool designed to skew elections for the left. Even if that were not true, RCV is a needlessly complicated voting system that injects uncertainty and undermines confidence in elections. That’s why voters are rejecting RCV and lawmakers are banning it nationwide. North Carolina would be wise to follow suit.

Jason Snead is the executive director of Honest Elections Project Action. Andy Jackson is the director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation