Ranked Choice Voting — Why We Need It

5 min readJun 13, 2022

Unless you were a die-hard Trump supporter, there wasn’t a presidential candidate to be excited about in the 2016 election; not one with a chance of winning, that is. Sure, Hillary Clinton must have had some die-hard supporters, but they weren’t around every corner. There were more people who thought she would make an okay president, certainly better than Donald Trump.

Then there were traditional conservatives who couldn’t overlook Trump’s immorality, but would never dream of voting for Hillary Clinton; moderates who were equally turned off by both; and establishment Republicans who thought Trump was taking the party to hell. For these voters, there was no good option; perhaps not even a lesser of two evils.

Some turned to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who seemed liked a reasonable alternative to the polarizing Trump and Clinton. This led to the party’s best performance in a presidential race to date, but they still only received 3.3% of the popular vote. The two-party system couldn’t be shaken, even with extraordinarily off-putting candidates at the respective helms.

What we have in the United States is a political duopoly that obliges millions of Americans to choose between two candidates they deplore. There’s nothing good about that. My friends who agree remind that individuals like myself viewing a third-party vote as a throw-away is what preserves the collective problem. They are correct, to a point, but we are still left with the dilemma of how to get enough people to move at once. It’s a bit like starting another social media platform from the ground up when everyone is already on Twitter and Facebook.

The best alternative is ranked-choice voting.

Revealed by its name, the system allows voters to rank every candidate on the ballot, rather than picking just one. Votes are then counted in rounds. If your first-choice candidate receives the fewest collective votes, they are knocked out, and your vote counts toward your second choice in the next round. This continues until one candidate has more than 50% of the collective vote, with them being declared the winner.

So, suppose your favorite candidate is neither Republican nor Democrat, but you would prefer one of those two more than the other. In the status quo, most people in your shoes vote for one of the two-party candidates, not wanting to waste their vote. With RCV, you could rank the candidate you actually like as #1, but if they lose, your vote would then be counted toward your next preferred candidate. From a cynical perspective, it’s least evil at the top and most evil at the bottom, with layers in between. Currently we choose the lesser of only two evils, which could even be the two on the ballot you dislike the most.

In effect, the playing field is leveled, and “third parties” could be on equal footing with the Red and Blue. New parties would undoubtedly spring up to fill the gap inhabited by the moderate majority, which would encourage Republicans and Democrats to stop pandering to the extremists in their party and focus on what the average American wants. More options, better results.

RCV holds promise to ease the polarization in America. Right now, everything is two-sided, us versus them. An open marketplace of candidates would give us a true melting pot in the political arena. More of us would realize where our political beliefs overlap. Perhaps my favorite candidate is your second favorite! In the status quo, people only care if you and me voted Republican or Democrat.

Ranked-choice voting would shift us a bit closer to having no political parties at all. In general, the Founding Fathers loathed the idea of political parties based on their knowledge of politics in Europe. One of their greatest fears was that factions would tear the country apart. People already have a tendency to divide up into two camps, making every issue binary. In the U.S. (and many other countries to be fair), that tendency is abetted by a two-party system that is seemingly unbreakable… unless something changes.

Common Objections:

Unsurprisingly, many politicians strongly oppose ranked-choice voting. This fact alone isn’t worth much consideration, as those in power will predictably oppose reforms that have the potential to threaten their position. But let’s look at a couple of the specific objections raised by politicians and non-politicians alike.

One is that your vote may end up being cast for a candidate you dislike, and for whom you would not vote if you had only one choice. This is most likely to happen when a voter ranks losing candidates at the top. There’s a flaw in this objection though. It works just as well if not better as a criticism of the status quo. As things currently stand, countless Americans cast their vote for a candidate they dislike, but do so because the one other alternative with a chance of winning is considered worse. With RCV, your vote may end up going to the second-to-worst candidate in your eyes, but the improvement is you can give your favorite candidate a better chance of winning, while still guaranteeing your vote will be counted against the one you ranked last. Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s better.

Another criticism is that RCV is too complicated for voters to understand, leading to decreased trust in elections. Again, this is a growing feature of the status quo, as we’re all acutely aware after the 2020 election, and even 2016. Not to mention, plenty of voters already don’t understand things like the electoral college. Nevertheless, would RCV make it worse? The system does add another layer of complexity. Properly explained though, it’s not that difficult to understand. Simple education definitely needs to be part of the voting and registration process with RCV.

What’s the status of RCV in the US?

Two states, Maine and Alaska, as well as various localities, have already adopted ranked-choice voting. It’s still too early for there to be conclusive findings from studying the results. Alaska’s first RCV election is scheduled to take place this summer. Broader implementation and more time will be needed to accurately analyze the downstream effects. Unsurprisingly though, there haven’t been any alarming outcomes that should deter us from moving forward.

The reasoning behind ranked-choice voting is sound. In the status quo, if you’re unenthused by the main-party candidates, you have two sub-par options: (1) throw away your vote on a candidate that might get 1% of the vote, or (2) vote for the best of two candidates that you hate. Alternatively, with RCV, your vote can be cast for the candidate you sincerely like the most, while still guaranteeing it counts against the one viewed as the worst. Considering the direction politics is headed in this country, and the results of the last two elections, it’s clearly time for a change. Ranked-choice voting could be just what we need.