Rank Choice Voting Is Unfair And Undemocratic
Christy Narsi lives in Surprise, AZ. She is the National Chapter Director at Independent Women’s Network (IWN). Christy is passionate about developing and empowering women who make an impact in their communities. This piece originally appeared in Arizona Free News.
This November, Proposition 140, the Make Elections Fair Arizona Act, will be on the ballot. Prop. 140, if passed, would create a Rank-Choice Voting (RCV) system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. Supporters of the proposition claim it will incentivize candidates to reach out to as many voters as possible, regardless of party affiliation and “liberate us from the grip of partisan primary elections.”
But will it really make Arizona elections more fair?
RCV may seem logical on the surface, but in reality, it introduces a complex vote tabulation system that lacks transparency and often leads to weird election outcomes.
In most elections, a voter casts a single ballot for the candidate he or she likes most. With RCV’s ranking system, if one candidate receives more than 50 percent of first place votes, the election is over and the candidate with the most votes wins. If, however, no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes, election officials conduct a series of closed-door instant runoffs by eliminating the candidate with the fewest first place votes and redistributing those votes to the second choices on those ballots. This process continues (eliminating the last place finisher and redistributing his or her votes) until a faux majority is created for a single candidate.
Today, there is bipartisan support for ensuring every vote counts. Yet RCV guarantees the opposite, and instead will create confusion, dropped votes, and a convoluted system of ballot counting that does not represent the will of the people.
“Ranked Choice Voting can lead to bizarre outcomes where a person who was the first choice of very few voters can still win,” explained Independent Women’s Law Center’s Jennifer C. Braceras. Democratic principles are actually sidelined as RCV encourages candidates and interest groups to play games and try to manipulate outcomes by introducing additional candidates to divert attention from stronger opponents, rather than try to simply bolster their own support.
A study of ballot data from New York City’s 2013 and 2017 general election, and of New York City’s 2021 Democrat mayoral primaries, showed “ballot errors in RCV elections are particularly high in areas with lower levels of education, lower levels of income, higher minority populations, and a higher share of limited English proficient voters.”
Policymakers should be working to make voting easier and more accessible for all Arizonans. Therefore, we should reject schemes such as RCV that make voting more complicated, less accessible, and less transparent.
Voting should be simple: one person, one legal vote; may the best person win. RCV violates this principle by allowing some voters to effectively cast more than one ballot while excluding other voters whose ballots were exhausted prior to the ultimate run-off. RCV is a dangerously complex process that confuses voters and disincentivizes participation. This is a real threat to our democratic process.
