Tait Helgaas has written this student comment in the U. Pa. L. Rev. Here is the abstract:

As states and cities across the United States adopt instant runoff voting (IRV) in their constitutions and charters, they enact statutes and ordinances to implement this electoral system. IRV laws vary across jurisdictions, including by how many candidates they allow voters to rank and how they handle voters’ ballot-marking errors. These variations affect both the fraction of ballots disqualified due to voter error and whether an election’s winner is deemed to have earned a majority of votes. To maximize the number of ballots in the final round of tabulation and increase the odds of a majoritarian outcome, jurisdictions should consider adopting the IRV implementation rules proposed here: (1) allow voters to rank all candidates and (2) interpret overvotes, skipped rankings, and overrankings in the manner outlined within.

New from Alan Parry and John Kidd:

• This report discusses recent research on ranked choice voting (RCV) and ballot error rates. 
• Several studies indicate that ballot error in RCV elections follows the same patterns as error in non-RCV elections. However, two new studies – More Choices, More Problems? Ranked Choice Voting Errors in New York City and Ballot Marking Errors in Ranked-Choice Voting – claim that RCV increases ballot error rates. We show that both studies suffer from serious methodological and analytical flaws – the former from statistical analysis concerns and lack of suitable control cases, and the latter from false equivalence. 
• Overall, relatively few ballots in RCV elections contain an error, and even fewer ballots are rejected. For most ballots containing an error, the voter’s intent is clear and the ballot is counted as intended. 
• Future research should contextualize the impact of RCV more comprehensively, and compare RCV and single-choice voting more carefully. For example, if RCV and single-choice voting differ in terms of ballot error, that difference should be weighed against the fact that RCV makes more ballots count meaningfully. Recent research shows that RCV causes an average of 17% more votes to directly affect the outcome between top candidates. 

New article from Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley in Political Behavior:

Voters express their electoral preferences through their ballot. More states and local jurisdictions are adopting ranked choice voting (RCV), which affects how voter preferences are translated into electoral results by introducing a more complex ranked ballot and accompanying tabulation process. This research provides empirical estimates of rates of improper marking and vote rejection, and compares them to those rates on non-ranked offices (particularly single-mark, ‘choose-one-candidate’ offices). We describe a new, general typology for categorizing the ways voters can improperly mark a ranked ballot. We apply this typology to a database of ranked choice ballots that includes 3 million cast vote records representing over three-quarters of all Americans living in a jurisdiction that uses RCV. The data show that in a typical ranked choice race, nearly 1 in 20 (4.8%) voters improperly mark their ballot in at least one way. We argue that these improper marks are consistent with voter confusion about their ranked ballot, and find evidence that this mismarking rate is higher in areas with more racial minorities, lower-income households, and lower levels of educational attainment. We further find that votes in ranked choice races are about 10 times more likely to be rejected due to an improper mark than votes in non-ranked choice races. These findings raise key questions about voter participation and representation in ranked choice systems and have important policy implications for jurisdictions that already have or are considering adopting ranked choice voting.

Axios:

A new poll shows most voters in Portland preferred ranked-choice voting to the city’s previous election method.

Why it matters: Previous polling showed the new system was widely understood by most voters, but this survey is the first to gauge the electorate’s preference as voters made decisions on who would take power under the city’s new form of government.

Mike Parsons and Rachel Hutchinson have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

As Americans grow disenchanted with democracy, many scholars suggest that election reforms may offer a path forward. The fastest growing of these reforms is ranked choice voting (RCV). In RCV elections, voters rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third, and so on. The candidates with the least support are eliminated, and ballots that ranked those candidates count for their next choice instead. This method has over a century of use in public elections and provides proven benefits well-suited to many of the problems facing our country.

Yet some social choice theorists now argue that reformers have backed the wrong horse. They propose a different family of methods: Condorcet-compliant methods (CCMs). These scholars note that on rare occasions RCV can elect a winner other than the “Condorcet candidate” (i.e., the candidate who would have won against every other contender in pairwise contests), and they contend CCMs would fix this “flaw.” 

In this Article, we step back from the theoretical conversations about formal, mathematical election-system criteria that have dominated the discourse and offer a more functional framework for analyzing proposed reforms. This “reform for realists” approach seeks to situate the existing literature in a richer scholarly context, to surface and center key normative questions, and to ground future study in a thicker (albeit messier) account of mediated, pluralistic politics and competing reform options.

Through this wider lens, we evaluate the latest CCM literature and argue that much of it misses the forest for the trees, ignoring fundamental principles of democratic design and first-order questions at the foundation of election law. CCM advocacy to date builds on unrealistic assumptions about voter behavior; elides critical, complex, and contested normative questions; overlooks essential relationships between candidates, parties, campaigns, elections, and governance; and ultimately cannot deliver on its core promise: the guaranteed election of a genuine Condorcet candidate. Under real-world conditions, CCMs may even risk electing the candidate opposed by most voters.

In the end, a functional framework suggests there are limits to the value of comparing the real-world performance of known reforms to the hypothetical performance of untested reforms based on how rational voters or candidates “should” behave. CCMs may benefit from the study of private use cases and then initial municipal adoptions before wider applications are considered. For now, CCMs do not appear to offer benefits that can be predicted with the confidence to justify immediate use in government elections to public office, especially at the state or federal level.

Greg Dennis blogs.

Eveline Dowling in The Fulcrum:

n the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S….