Choice, confusion, and change

In 2001, students at the University of Santa Barbara voted for their school’s student body president using an obscure election method called “ranked choice voting.” At the time, those students were among the first in the entire United States to implement the practice. But two decades later, the practice isn’t just used to elect student body presidents anymore and is in place in 53 cities, one county, and two states. Alaska, which adopted the system through a ballot measure in 2020, will use choice ranked voting to select its newest congressional representative this November.

“It’s the fastest-growing voting reform in the nation,” said Will Mantell, a spokesperson for the voting reform advocacy group FairVote. “In 2016 it was probably in less than 10 places. And now it’s in over 50.”

Mantell says that proposals to enact ranked choice voting are on the ballot in 10 different locations for the midterms, including the state of Nevada, the city of Seattle, and others.

The growing adoption of ranked choice voting has given voters more options on the ballot while simultaneously creating confusion about how the process creates winners and losers. Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of that confusion, moderate candidates are finding space to leverage their platforms.

But what is ranked choice voting? And how does it work?

Those are two questions that Alaska state Rep. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage, has answered a lot this past fall as he has trudged through snowy afternoons to knock on the doors of his constituents. Alaska is back to being an American frontier—this time in the field of politics.

“It almost feels like we’re living in a political science project,” Kaufman said.

Instead of choosing a single candidate, ranked voting asks participants to rank their favorite candidates in order of preference—first, second, third, and so on—depending on the number of candidates voters are permitted to select.

At first, the election works like a normal one. All candidates receive the votes from ballots on which they are ranked No. 1. But that quickly changes if a candidate is eliminated from contention. When a candidate is knocked out of the race, a voter’s “next best choice” comes into play, and his ballot is then counted in favor of that candidate.

The process continues until someone receives 50 percent of the vote or until there’s only one candidate left. It’s this pattern that gives ranked choice voting another nickname, “instant runoff voting.”

While virtually all CRV systems work in this manner, their applications can vary greatly. Mantell explained that in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina,  for instance, military personnel deployed overseas, who can’t easily access mail-in voting, use CRV in the event of a runoff election. In those cases, ranked voting allows them to participate by pre-recording their “next best” option. Additionally, holding one CRV election is significantly cheaper for states than holding multiple head-to-head elections.

While the system offers advantages like these, it also produces a degree of confusion.

Alaskans were abruptly introduced to ranked choice voting when Don Young, the state’s former lone congressman, died and threw the state into a special election. Participants had to vote for two things: one was a general election to decide who would fill the seat immediately for the rest of Young’s term. The other was a primary to vote for the nominees who would run for the seat later in November. The former was a ranked choice election. The primary for the later election was a traditional vote.

“You had the two elections on the same ballot,” Kaufman said. “You would flip the thing over and—okay, we’re ranking now.”

Kaufman said he encountered a lot of voters who refused to make use of the ranked options, demanding a return to a simpler system. He tried to explain that by not making use of their multiple options, those voters would limit the power of their ballot. But he had a hard time getting that message across. Others were caught off guard and filled out their ballots incorrectly, making errors like using all of their votes on just one candidate.

To make matters more confusing, Alaska, a highly Republican state, managed to elect Democratic candidate Mary Peltola over Sarah Palin, a high-profile Republican and former governor of the state, in the special election. Palin, a staunch opponent to ranked choice voting, had encouraged voters to vote only for her and to disregard any other second-place options. Although she recanted later, Palin even went as far as to tell voters not to bother putting her second if they weren’t going to put her name at the top of the ballot.

Going into her November rematch against Peltola, Palin has she intends to better use ranked choice voting but remains fiercely opposed to the system.

“We have a couple of jobs in front of us,” Palin told Politico. “One is to explain to Alaskans what this ranked choice voting actually results in. They do not want [a Democrat] to go vote for them in Congress. Because of the whole convoluted second-place votes, third-place votes, … that’s what it’s resulted in.”

Many detractors of the system in Alaska point out that a majority of the campaign funds advocating for ranked choice voting  back in 2020 came from somewhere outside of Alaska. Because of that, Kaufman says there’s a degree to which he feels like the move has been a push from forces beyond their borders.

“We’re a very small media market … We get affected by people who see us as an opportunity to move the needle. It’s much cheaper to try to put in a system like this here than it is in California or Texas,” Kaufman said.

Studies show that the support and trust for ranked choice voting is popular among separate demographics of younger, Democratic, and more educated audiences, according to a 2021 survey written by experts from Auburn University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis titled Public Perceptions of Alternative Voting Systems: Results from a National Survey Experiment.

When asked to evaluate the method on fairness, a majority of voters ranked the system just beneath traditional voting, expressing a lack of confidence in its results. About 46 percent of voters said they were “somewhat confident” in traditional voting, compared to 36.9 percent of people who said the same of ranked choice. That gap became more pronounced when respondents were asked if they were “very confident.” Here, 31.2 percent of voters expressed high levels of confidence in regular ballots compared to only 17.5 percent of respondents who expressed similar confidence in ranked choice.

Despite public mistrust, Mantell says ranked choice is a growing system for a reason. He believes that the more people are exposed to the system, the more the support for its adoption will grow. Part of that, he says, is because ranked choice voting directly challenges the kind of bipartisan polarization that frustrates many voters today. By giving voters a second, third, and maybe even fourth option, moderate candidates have more of a chance to win an election. Traditional front-runners who have relied on polarization to galvanize voters will have to take that into consideration or risk alienating voters who support other candidates.

“It changes the way you campaign. It’s like introducing the 3-point shot in basketball. You have to think about how you’re going to get that majority with that deep support, those first choices, and how if needed, that broad support, those second and third choices,” Mantell said.