How Ranked Choice Voting Works and Where It Breaks Down

Superior to Choose 1, but

Key Advantages

RCV Problems

Superior to Choose 1 but not good enough

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) lets you rank the candidates. Your ballot will show your preference for Candidate C over candidates A, B, & D.

Because voters can rank every candidate, RCV will show voter support for third party and independent candidates. They will have a fair chance to win. Voters may be limited in RCV races with many candidates.

RCV is also known as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), Preferential Voting, Alternative Vote, and Hare. Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a version of RCV for proportional representation. Australia has used RCV (they call it Preferential Voting) for over 100 years to elect the lower chamber of parliament. The proportional upper chamber uses STV.

Runoff elections are unnecessary because RCV has an instant runoff.

RCV is susceptible to spoilers, though they occur far less often in RCV races than “Choose 1” plurality races.

The problem is RCV spoilers are nigh impossible to predict and avoid. In Choose 1 races, the threat of spoilers is painfully obvious. Voters avoid spoilers by voting for the less evil major party candidate rather than a worthy third party or independent candidate.

Sarah Palin, through no fault of her own, spoiled fellow Republican Nick Begich in a 2022 Alaskan RCV race. Democrat Mary Peltola won, even though the ballots showed that Begich would have won one-on-one races against both Palin and Peltola^[1].

Many Republicans oppose RCV because of that result. A similar Democratic loss will erode Democratic support for RCV.

The BTR-Score voting method shares the advantages of RCV, but it is not prone to spoilers. BTR-Score is the best voting method for single-winner elections.

RCV Vote Counts

Votes are counted in rounds. After each round, the candidate with the fewest top-ranked votes is eliminated.

Round 1

From each ballot, count the Top Ranked Candidate. If a candidate has over 50% of the Top Ranked Candidates on the ballots, that candidate is elected.

Additional Rounds

If there is no winner, eliminate the candidate with the fewest top rankings.

On each ballot, the top candidate not yet eliminated becomes that voter's Top Ranked Candidate.

If a candidate now has over 50% of the Top Ranked Candidates, that candidate is elected.

If not, repeat the process, eliminating one candidate after each round, until a candidate has over 50% of the Top Ranked Candidates. That candidate is elected.

Key Advantages of Ranked Choice Voting

Voters Can Support More Than One Candidate

Voters can support third party and independent candidates and their preferred major party candidate. The threat of spoilers is reduced but not eliminated.

More Voice for Voters

Voters can rank every candidate (unless there are many candidates). You can rank only one candidate as better than the others in a traditional Choose 1 race.

Less Negative Campaign Rhetoric

Candidates will need “second-choice votes” to win RCV races with 3 or more candidates. While turning out the base is still important, candidates also need broad support to win. In ranked elections, voters can punish divisive candidates with low rankings. Campaigns should calm down.

Constitutional in Most States

Many state constitutions have language that requires a winning candidate to receive the “highest,” “greatest,” or “largest” number of votes, or “a plurality of the votes.” RCV complies with those state constitutions. Defenders of the status quo will litigate against any advanced voting method.

Rated voting methods, such as Score and Approval voting, also comply because they allow every voter to cast votes to rate each candidate; the candidate with the “highest number of votes” wins.

Resistance to Strategy

Organizing a strategic campaign in an RCV election would be difficult. A winning strategy would require precise polling data. Many voters would need to be organized. A mistake could hurt your candidate. Your best bet is to rank candidates sincerely. RCV is susceptible to the spoiler effect. To exploit this strategically, you could encourage someone to run who will draw votes from your chief opponent.

RCV Problems

Counting the Vote

Defenders of the status quo shriek in horror because advanced voting methods are more difficult to count than plurality voting. RCV allows voters to rank all candidates, so there is more information to count. Australia has counted RCV and STV proportional representation ballots for years. If they can do it, we can do it.

Opponents claim RCV is too confusing for voters, especially seniors. What is so difficult about ranking candidates? This is an insult to the voters.

Strategic Regret

After several RCV elections, losing parties learned they could have won with a different voting strategy. If voters who liked two candidates had voted differently, they could have altered the elimination order of those candidates and changed the winner.

Not all RCV “second choice” votes count. The order of candidate elimination determines which second-choice votes are counted. This can affect the outcome.

Problems in Practice

Choose 1 voting has a vote-splitting problem in every race with three or more candidates. RCV also has issues in those races; the question is, how often will problems occur?

Adam Graham-Squire and David McCune studied 182 RCV elections that had three or more candidates. In their report, “An Examination of Ranked Choice Voting in the United States, 2004-2022,” they wrote:

“RCV mostly performs well in practice. In the American ranked-choice political elections in our database, RCV almost always selects the Condorcet winner and avoids the spoiler effect, while also showing practical resistance to strategic voting.

Paradoxes which feature prominently in the theoretical literature such as monotonicity and no-show paradoxes seem to occur on the order of 0.5-1.1% for real world elections without a majority candidate, and these failure rates would decrease considerably if we also included ranked-choice elections which do not advance to a second round.”^[1]

They also cautioned:
“If a failure is observed in an election for a very important office, then RCV’s overall good performance becomes less important.”

It is unclear how many of the 182 elections had three or more candidates within 15% of each other. Elections with three or more competitive candidates are difficult for RCV. If two or more candidates have similar platforms, the difficulty increases.

The Spoiler Effect

RCV avoids the spoiler effect in most races because voters can support multiple candidates. Because some “second choice” votes are not counted, RCV races can be spoiled.

Consider this example from mingo.info. (condensed for brevity) Unfortunately, the author is not listed.

“In this election, your favorite is a popular Libertarian. A Republican is your second choice, and you dislike the Democrat. If the Libertarian has the fewest first-choice votes, he or she will be eliminated, and your 2nd-choice vote will go to the Republican, as you wish.

What if the Republican is eliminated before the Libertarian? Unless all the 1st-choice Republican ballots have the Libertarian as their 2nd choice (unlikely), the Democrat might beat the Libertarian. If so, you helped the Democrat by not strategically voting for the Republican first.

By voting your true choice (Libertarian, Republican, Democrat last), you increase the chances of eliminating the Republican before the Libertarian. If that happens, your preference for the Republican over the Democrat will be ignored.”

RCV is less prone to spoilers than Choose 1 voting, but there is no obvious way to avoid spoilers.

Condorcet “Beats All” Winner

Picture a single-winner RCV election between three candidates with near equal support:
Debbie Democrat - 35%
Mike Moderate - 31%
Richard Republican - 33%

In this election, most Democrats rank Mike Moderate second on their ballots because they prefer him to Richard Republican. Mike Moderate is also ranked second on the ballots of most Republicans because they prefer him to Debbie Democrat. Plus, 31% of the voters rank Mike as their top choice.

Mike has the most overall support. Mike would beat both Debbie and Richard in one-on-one races; therefore, Mike is the “beats all” or Condorcet winner. The Condorcet criterion holds that single-winner election methods should elect the "Beats All" winner if there is such a candidate in an election.

Because Mike finishes in third place, Ranked Choice Voting would eliminate him before counting his second-choice votes on the ballots of Debbie Democrat and Richard Republican. If Mike finished first or second in the first round of Ranked Choice Voting, he would win on the strength of those second-choice rankings.

Center Squeeze Effect

Candidates appeal to the party base in primary elections. In a contested general election, they may move towards the center, squeezing the moderate candidate. Voting methods that rate candidates, like Score and Approval Voting, offer greater resistance to a center squeeze than RCV. Choose 1 voting has little resistance.

RCV is not a True Majority Method

Contrary to some claims, RCV does not guarantee a true majority winner because it does not count all second-choice votes, and some ballots may be otherwise exhausted. Separate two-candidate runoff elections are required for a majority winner, but runoffs are problematic because they involve a different set of voters voting on a different day. A runoff could have a different result if the same two candidates faced off, one-on-one, in the general election.

Summary

Ranked Choice Voting is superior to traditional Choose 1 plurality voting.
RCV is fairer to third party and independent candidates.
RCV enables far greater voter expression than Choose 1 voting.
RCV has an instant runoff, there is no need for runoff elections.
RCV and other advanced voting methods encourage civil campaigns by rewarding candidates with broad support. Also, voters can punish divisive candidates by giving them low ranks.
RCV elections report voter support of third parties and independent candidates.
RCV resists organized strategic voting campaigns and strategic voting by individual voters.
RCV complies with most state constitutions.
Spoilers can occur in RCV races, especially if two or more candidates have similar platforms. Spoilers are infrequent, but they are difficult to predict and avoid.
RCV may fail to elect the Condorcet “Beats All” winner.
RCV has moderate resistance to the Center Squeeze Effect.
RCV is not an actual majority method.
Voters may not be able to rank every candidate in elections with many candidates.

The Top Four and Final Five voting systems use RCV. Their four and five candidate runoffs create competitive elections. The first Top Four election had a spoiler in a race with three strong candidates. This was a high-profile congressional race featuring Nick Begich, Mary Peltola, and Sarah Palin.

RCV improves upon Choose 1 plurality voting; however, it is inadequate. Rated voting methods like Score, STAR and BTR-Score avoid spoilers and vote splitting.

Key sources for this article:
Fair Vote is the leading advocate of Ranked Choice Voting. For more information about RCV, visit FairVote.org.

Electowiki covers RCV, they call it Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).

The previously mentioned Center for Election Science article analyzing the 2022 Alaskan congressional special election.