Ranked Choice Voting is the best way to express your true preference in an election 

Here’s How it Works

On a ranked choice ballot, you don’t just pick a single option when you vote. Instead you rank your first preference, and second preference, and so on — hence the name “ranked choice.”

There are several different ways to conduct a ranked choice vote. Here we will concern ourselves with what is called instant-runoff voting, and those terms will mostly be used interchangeably.

In an instant-runoff vote, voters’ first-preference votes are tallied. Then if no candidate has a majority of the votes, the candidate in last place is eliminated, and the vote of people who ranked that candidate first will be assigned to their second choice. This process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes.

To say the same thing in a different way, if your first choice doesn’t have enough votes to win, your second preference is used instead. Then if your second choice doesn’t have enough votes to win your third choice is used etc. Your vote is always counted for your favorite candidate left in the running.

Here’s an example of a hypothetical Ranked Choice Vote from ballotpedia.com

Why this is Good

In a traditional (or “plurality”) voting system, it is a common problem that none of the most popular candidates are to your liking. You might prefer to vote for someone who isn’t well-known enough to win the election. This puts you in an unfair situation with only two bad choices:

  1. You could “throw away” your vote by casting a ballot for your preferred third-party candidate who has no real chance to win.

  2. You could hold your nose and vote for the “lesser of two evils” candidate you don’t really like, but who might actually have a chance to win.

By using a Ranked Choice Voting system, we eliminate this problem entirely. You can still indicate your preferred candidate as your first choice on the ballot, and then rank the other “least bad” candidate as a backup option. You can even specify a backup to your backup!

This allows you to express your true preference without feeling like you have given away the election to a candidate you really dislike. You no longer have to “strategically vote” according to how you assume other voters might act; you can simply vote.

Real world examples

There are lots of places where some form of Ranked Choice Voting is being used right now.

In the United States, Maine and Alaska both use Ranked Choice Voting extensively. Several Cities throughout the country also use Ranked Choice Voting in mayoral, city council, and other elections.

Ireland, India, Australia and other countries also use some form of Ranked Choice Voting (either instant-runoff or another system) for some of their elections.

Practical Benefits

The most obvious benefit of Ranked Choice Voting is that it allows you to vote the way you want without having to risk spoiling the election in favor of your least preferred candidate. You can simply vote your preference!

In a plurality election, strategic voting naturally causes a two-party system to emerge. Occasionally third-parties will rise or fall in prominence, but they never have any real chance of winning simply because people don’t want to “throw away” their vote. This effectively sidelines the supporters of third-party candidates and turns them into “protest” voters that won’t really affect the election outcome. Ranked Choice Voting makes these candidates viable by eliminating this spoiler effect. The term “third party” no longer even makes sense in the context of a Ranked Choice Voting system. This could explain why major parties often oppose Ranked Choice Voting — because Ranked Choice Voting gives people the ability to chose somebody else without fear of wasting their vote.

Similar to a “protest vote” in a plurality election, some people chose not to vote at all. They don’t want to vote for either of the two major party candidates, and feel that casting a protest vote would be a waste their time. It’s impossible to determine how any individual factor might impact a persons decision of whether to vote, but it seems obvious that a Ranked Choice Voting system would provide more people with a way to express their preference with a viable chance of affecting the outcome of an election, and that should encourage some would-be-non-voters to turn out.

Criticism

No honest discussion would be complete without acknowledging the criticisms that are leveled against Ranked Choice Voting.

There are several technical mathematical pitfalls of Ranked Choice Voting. These include the Condorcet winner criterion, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and others. The mathematics of voting systems are quite interesting. If you want to learn the details I encourage you to continue researching that elsewhere. This site will not go into that level of detail. I personally think that while some problems do exist in principle, their practical effect is not troubling. Often the examples where these issues arise feel contrived and abstract. Ranked Choice Voting is still far better than the spoiler effects and other problems of traditional plurality voting. No voting system is perfect, and Ranked Choice Voting strikes a good balance of the many different considerations.

Some people think that Ranked Choice Voting is too difficult to understand, and will confuse people at the ballot box. This is largely overblown, and is really just a problem of familiarity and education.

Similarly some people contend that Ranked Choice Voting leads to election results that are less trusted than plurality voting. Once again this largely comes down to a problem of education. When people understand the system and get used to it they will trust it. Rather, trust in elections is mostly a reflection of the general level of trust in the government overseeing the election. If you pay attention to politics in the United States, it’s obvious that the trust in election results has little to do with how they were conducted.

Some people contend that Ranked Choice Voting doesn’t actually result in different outcomes in than plurality voting. This is a weak argument. If the outcomes are not different, but you still get the benefit of any number of viable and spoiler-free candidates running, and you are able to indicate your true preference, then there is effectively no downside to switching from plurality voting. In reality though it is difficult to disentangle the effect that the existence of a Ranked Choice Voting system has on the candidates who run, and how they ran their campaigns. It is overly simplistic to say that an election would have been no different if a different system was used to count the votes.

Center Squeeze is the name for the effect where centrist candidates are ranked second by most voters, and thus eliminated early, leaving only more polar candidates. This is similar to the problem that occurs in a traditional plurality voting system with primaries where more extreme candidates tend to win the primary, and moderate candidates don’t make it to the general election ballot. This is a natural outcome of a system where people vote based on their first preference rather than their least-worst preference. I don’t find this to be troubling at all. To me this is just an indication that the centrist candidates simply aren’t compelling enough to make people actually want them in office.

Critics of Ranked Choice Voting point to the existence of strategic voting, tactical voting, and other gamesmanship that is still possible. For example, candidates with similar goals might instruct their voters to rank each other as their second choice. It’s important to remember that all voting systems is susceptible to some forms of tactical behavior. This is just a practical reality. The example of telling voters who their second choice should be is not meaningfully different from voter education. Voters will naturally rank similar candidates similarly, and acknowledging that explicitly as a candidate seems only natural.

Learn More

There are many resources online to understand the details of Ranked Choice Voting. An online search will yield many good results.

If you prefer to read your information, try starting here:

If you prefer video content try these:

  • Ranked Choice Voting Explained - Robert Reich and Inequality Media - YouTube video simply demonstrating how Ranked Choice Voting works, and it’s benefits

  • Every Election is Decided Before You Vote - CGP Grey - YouTube explainer on how and why plurality voting squeezes out third-party candidates

  • Voting Paradoxes - Numberphile - YouTube video that does a great job explaining the mathematical issues that can arise in a Ranked Choice Voting System, and briefly describing other alternate voting methods

  • Voting Systems and the Condorcet Paradox - PBS Infinite Series - YouTube video explaining the mathematical difficulty in constructing a good voting system, and the paradoxes that can arise

  • Arrow's Impossibility Theorem - PBS Infinite Series - YouTube video expanding on the last one demonstrating that no ranked voting system meets all three of the following criteria: unanimity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorial