Responding to Anon on Ranked Choice Voting

Anonymous commented on a  previous post about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).  They  raised common issues  about RCV.  I decided it was easier, if I responded in a new post.  This is it.

To make it as clear as possible for the reader to distinguish between us, my comments are in BLUE and the commenter's comments are RED  

"These are things to consider when you are waxing poetic about RCV:"  

From US Dictionary:   

"The idiom "waxing poetic" describes the action of speaking or writing in an increasingly enthusiastic or eloquent manner. Often, this phrase is used when someone starts using a more florid or poetic language than might be expected or necessary."

This was a pretty fact based blog post.  Not particularly enthusiastic for ranked choice nor particularly florid.  I did speak positively about open primaries, saying they led to bi-partisan majorities in the legislature.  The basic tone is a fairly muted support of RCV as in this quote:

"There is no perfect system.  Whatever system you have, people figure out ways to game the system.  Ideally, we will not get rid of Ranked Choice Voting in November and we can learn how to make it work."

"Ballot Exhaustion" & Disenfranchisement: In RCV, if all the candidates you ranked are eliminated in early rounds, your ballot is marked as "exhausted" and discarded before the final tally. Consequently, the winner often claims a "majority" only of the remaining active ballots, not a true majority of all voters who cast a ballot. 

You don't necessarily get a majority in any non-RCV election if it's a three or four way race, say  if there is a Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent on the ballot.  In most elections, the one with the most votes - not a necessarily a majority - wins.  The Anchorage Municipal election for mayor partially addresses this by requiring a runoff if no one gets at least 45% of the vote.  

At least in RCV you get to pick a second and third choice - meaning if your first choice candidate doesn't win, you get a chance to vote for a second choice candidate.  That doesn't happen in the old system.  In that system, if your first choice doesn't win, your vote is essentially exhausted too.  

⁠The "Center-Squeeze" & Non-Monotonicity*: RCV can produce bizarre mathematical anomalies where gaining support can cause a candidate to lose, or losing support can cause them to win. A moderate candidate who is the acceptable second choice for almost everyone can get eliminated in the first round simply because they lacked enough intense first-place votes, leaving two polarizing extremes.

First, I agree, that it's possible for someone to be everyone's second choice, but they wouldn't get onto the general election ballot because they didn't get enough first place votes.  Probably not likely, but possible.  But with closed primaries, that candidate probably wouldn't make it to the general election. If you had three candidates on the general ballot under the old system, I don't know that the hypothetical moderate would win either  and we wouldn't ever know they were everyone's second choice. 

Complexity & Higher Error Rates: Ranking multiple candidates increases the cognitive load on voters and leads to higher rates of spoiled ballots (e.g., unintentionally ranking two candidates first or skipping ranks). This complexity disproportionately impacts older voters, non-native English speakers, and lower-income communities.

I was a poll worker at two elections that were RCV.  My station was the scanner, where the voters put their ballots into the voting machine.  The machines spit out ballots that are marked incorrectly - for example, two candidates are marked as second choice.  The voter gets to have a new ballot and vote again.  The old ballot is turned in, torn up, and put into a destroyed ballot envelope.  All in front of the voter.  That didn't happen very often.  But I do suspect that some people's brains are wired so that an RCV ballot is harder for them to figure out.  But my experience is that it was a very small percent of voters. Voters made mistakes under the old system too. 

It would be an interesting study to be at a scanner and try to find common factors among people whose ballot is rejected because they marked the RCV ballot incorrectly.  It would also be tricky to do because of the confidentiality of elections and avoiding intimidating voters.  

Delayed Election Results: Because all ballots must be centralized and fully processed before any elimination round can occur, RCV slows down the reporting process. Late-arriving mail-in or military ballots can delay final results for days or weeks, which erodes public trust in election integrity.

It does take longer to tally votes if no candidate gets a majority in the first round.  But many races only have two candidates in the general election.  The problem, as I understand it, lies with the fact that for the second round, you have to wait for all the absentee ballots to arrive before tabulating the second round percentages.  But that is also a problem with regular voting that is close. 

For this you could do a study to see how many close votes are delayed until all the absentee votes are in for an RCV election and a regular election.  In Alaska you could compare the primary to the general, though we probably get more candidates in the primary than normal because of the open primaries.  Having a president who constantly tells the world that the elections are rigged, does a lot more harm to public confidence than a few dragged out elections  Most voters understand the need to wait for absentee ballots to come in.  

But why does it matter?  As long as the winner is determined before they need to be sworn in, there is no problem except that people are impatient to know who the winner is.  


Increased Costs & System Upgrades: Transitioning to RCV requires expensive updates to voting software, hardware, and extensive public education campaigns funded by taxpayers.

Upgrades - these have already been done.  Changing back to regular elections will cost more if we change back than if we keep what we have.  

Also, with RCV, you don't have the expense of runoff elections as we have in Anchorage mayoral races if no one gets at least 45%.  

*Non-Monotonicity - anyone else unable to explain that?  I did look it up.  Not sure how it applies here  Maybe because the highest vote getter can change from one round to the next when the second and third round votes get added in and the lowest vote getters drop out.