North Dakota’s governor recently signed a bill prohibiting ranked-choice voting in the state. That started a conversation and disagreement in this open thread on the subject of ranked-choice voting. In red or blue states, ranked-choice voting often pits people from the same party against each other in the final round, and because people from the opposing party have no candidate, they can vote for the candidate the members of the dominant party don’t want. It also causes confusion and delay in getting final results.
I don’t especially like it. It’s not that the two-party system – with a primary for each party and generally a single nominee for each party – is perfect. Certainly not. But I prefer it to a system where the final candidates sometimes end up being from the same party, and/or where second-choices can determine elections.
Take the example of the re-election of Lisa Murkowski to the Senate in 2022:
This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.
Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.
In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.
Perhaps Murkowski would have won anyway, even under the rules of a traditional election. But her majority vote came from Democrats who preferred her to the other Republican (see the chart at the link; rounds 2 and 3).
Another Alaska election that same year was the House race in 2022 in which Democrat Mary Peltola was elected in a Republican district. In the open primary dictated by the rules (rather than primaries to select a candidate from each party), sole Democrat Peltola had gotten about 36% of the vote and the two GOP candidates combined to get about 56% of the vote.
However, the two GOP candidates (Begich and Palin) stayed in the race and spent much of their money and time attacking each other. If one had been eliminated in single-party primaries, that would not have happened (unless one ran as an Independent). In the final vote, Peltola won in this manner:
Peltola won the election with 54.94% of the vote in the third round of ballot-counting, after two other candidates, Begich III and Bye, were eliminated and their supporters’ votes were reallocated to the remaining candidates, according to the Alaska Division of Elections. Peltola had won nearly 49% of the vote in the first round, putting her close to victory from the beginning. Even though only about 10% of the eliminated Republican candidates’ supporters ranked Peltola as their next choice, rather than Palin, it was enough to secure her win.
In this case, as far as we can tell it wasn’t Peltola’s being chosen as second choice by Democrats that put her over the top (she was the only Democrat in the race), it was being chosen as second-choice by a small number of voters who had supported the losing GOP candidate Begich and who placed her rather than the controversial Palin as their second choice. The fact that a ton of money had poured into the state to support Peltola didn’t hurt, either.
In 2024, however, Begich ousted Peltola. The Republicans were wiser that time, despite ranked-choice voting still being in operation in Alaska:
Peltola finished first in this summer’s top-four, nonpartisan primary, followed by Begich and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R). But Dahlstrom, backed by President-elect Trump, then bowed out of the race as the party sought to avoid fissures that were seen as paving the path for Peltola in the midterms.
House Republicans’ campaign arm had targeted the Alaska seat as an “offensive pickup” opportunity and named Dahlstrom to its “Young Guns” list, but its chair praised Dahlstrom for her exit. Begich then picked up Trump’s endorsement.
So although this was a ranked-choice race with an open primary, the GOP made sure that the general was like a conventional race rather than a ranked choice one; it featured a single candidate from each party. The results were that Begich won – this time despite Peltola’s candidacy being supported by about seven times more money than his (probably mostly from out-of-state), and despite the fact that she was endorsed by Murkowski and also had gotten more votes in the initial primary than the two GOP candidates combined.
Or, take the 2022 election of Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao who won – barely – because of 2nd-place votes, giving her the victory over the person who actually got the most 1st-place votes. Thao ended up being recalled after a year in office, by the way.
I mention that ranked-choice often sows confusion; this article explains some of what I mean:
With a ranked-choice ballot, however, if there are five candidates running for each of those offices, then a voter is supposed to “vote” 30 times, ranking all five candidates for each of the six offices.
This requires a longer, more complicated ballot with more instructions, more pages and more ways to make mistakes. The process takes longer, which means more ballots are left incomplete. Many voters simply don’t have an opinion about who is their third, fourth or fifth choice in many elections. Yet leaving rankings blank creates the possibility of a ballot being excluded from the final results.
Counting ranked-choice ballots must be centralized and can only proceed after all ballots are returned and adjudicated. Initially, only first-preference votes are counted. If a candidate has a majority, he or she wins (and the whole ranked-choice process becomes irrelevant). If not, then the least popular candidate is eliminated, ballots with that candidate first are “adjusted” to move up the second preference to be counted as a first preference, and there is a new round of counting. Any of those ballots that have no second preference are eliminated.
This means that some ballots are counted for the same candidate in every round, while voters who prefer the least popular candidates may be counted for several different candidates as their choices are eliminated. If a voter’s preference is eliminated with no more rankings, then that voter’s ballot is considered “exhausted” and is not included in any further counting or in the final results.
Lastly, I believe it’s telling that it’s mainly the left pushing for ranked-choice voting:
Progressive groups and their donors spent more than $100 million last year pushing ranked-choice voting …