Category Archives: alternative voting systems
“Most Third Party Voters Support Ranked Choice Voting and Preferred Trump Over Harris, Poll Finds”
A new nationwide poll from FairVote and Lake Research Partners surveyed Americans who voted for third-party and independent candidates for president. Key findings include:
- 87% of third-party voters say they are aware of ranked choice voting (RCV). 86% say they support it.
- These voters preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. In the poll, Jill Stein voters (66%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voters (59%), and Chase Oliver voters (a 36% plurality) all preferred Trump to Harris.
- Given a choice between only the two major-party candidates, most third-party voters would still vote, but 13% say they would not and 5% are not sure.
- These voters are ideologically committed to voting third-party. They like and trust third-party candidates, strongly dislike the two-party system, and strongly dislike the status quo.
The November survey included 538 people who voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee; Chase Oliver, the Libertarian nominee; and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West.
“State Battles Over Ranked Choice Voting Reveal Shifting Fault Lines”
CMD:
It’s been a bad year for advocates of ranked-choice voting reforms.
Legislatures in five states banned the reform outright, as did voters in Missouri. And voters in four states — Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon — rejected referendums on adopting the new system. Only in the District of Columbia did a majority vote in favor of adopting the reform, and Alaskans chose to keep ranked-choice voting by a remarkably close 0.25% margin.
However, Democratic strategists and funders behind this year’s push for RCV may be able to learn from the losses. In three of the four ballot measure states, RCV initiatives were combined with a proposal for open primaries, flipping typical supporters to opponents. In Colorado and Nevada, where RCV was combined with open primaries, progressive groups joined the opposition, and business interests flooded the coffers of the PACs supporting the measures.
The pushback against ranked-choice voting (RCV) — which allows voters to rank candidates according to their preference instead of choosing just one — is typically part of a larger Republican-aligned effort to restrict voting rights by limiting voting by mail, banning ballot drop boxes, and raising the threshold for passage of popular ballot initiatives.
MAGA groups oppose the practice as likely to favor Democrats and moderate Republicans over their candidates. Indeed, “election integrity” groups associated with Leonard Leo and Cleta Mitchell have been attacking ranked-choice voting options in their larger sweep to restrict voting rights, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing bill mill, has developed and circulated model legislation to prohibit it.
“Special interests are pushing a novel and complicated election process called ranked-choice voting,” ALEC’s model bill states. The group contends that the alternative voting system creates “a conflict between local and state election processes,” a claim legal scholars rebut. ALEC also highlights ranked-choice voting as systematically undermining the nation’s election systems in its annual “essential policy solutions” report for 2025.
At ALEC’s annual meeting in 2023, the custom hotel room keys featured anti-RCV branding. Key card sponsors gain access to lawmakers and VIP events at the conference, according to sponsorship materials obtained and reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)….
“The recount is over. Alaska will keep ranked choice voting.”
Election officials finished recounting the results of Ballot Measure 2 on Monday, and the outcome remains unchanged.
Alaska will keep ranked choice voting and open primaries.
The repeal effort failed by 743 votes, or about a quarter of one percentage point, according to the Division of Elections. That’s almost exactly the margin reflected in official results certified late last month, which showed the measure failing by 737 out of more than 300,000 votes.
The Alaska Republican Party requested the recount and monitored vote-counting alongside the anti-repeal campaign, No On 2.
During the recount, election officials re-scanned ballots and took a closer look at ballots where the voter’s choice wasn’t clear. …
“Most Portlanders understood ranked-choice election, poll finds, but there’s work to do”
Interesting follow-up exit polling on Portland’s new system. The city’s report is here.
“Ranked-choice voting continues to work in Alaska. It would everywhere else, too.”
Washington Post’s Editorial Board comes out in favor of RCV, arguing it is working well in both Alaska and Maine to select more moderate candidates that are more likely to reflect the preferences of electoral majorities, and that it is not confusing:
“Ranked-choice voting continues to work in Alaska. It would everywhere else, too.”Apart from accusations that it favors Democrats, which haven’t been borne out, the biggest knock on RCV is that it’s too confusing for people to rank candidates. But studies show that virtually all ballots cast in RCV elections are valid, with error rates similar to those of traditional elections. Usually, after trying it once, people become more comfortable with ranking candidates when they realize that they don’t need to vote strategically, worrying about throwing away their vote by supporting as their first choice someone who is unlikely to win.”
I do wonder how well RCV would transfer to larger, less rural states. Alaska and Maine are certainly not representative, and neither is subject to the same national forces as, say, Pennsylvania.
“Ballot measures to upend state election systems failed across the country”
Statewide efforts to adopt open and nonpartisan primaries, as well as ranked choice voting, failed in this year’s election, delivering a stinging setback to the election reform movement.
The measures sought to reduce political polarization in U.S. politics. And while an overwhelming share of Americans say they are unhappy with the country’s democratic systems, these initiatives were voted down in states across the country this week.
“The status quo won this year,” said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms. “The pro-democracy ballot measures, including anti-gerrymandering reform and open primary-only initiatives, tended to do worse than expected at the ballot.”
Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota had ballot measures that would have replaced party primaries with nonpartisan contests and/or created a ranked choice voting system in their elections. A majority of those measures sought to implement both.
An effort to move to an independent redistricting commission in Ohio lost. And a measure to repeal nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska remains too close to call….
“Another 2024 election loser: Ranked choice voting”
Voters in multiple states rejected structural changes to how they vote.
More initiatives that could transform how voters vote were on ballots across the country than ever before. Many would have combined two proposals popular with reformers — an open, all-party primary that multiple candidates advance out of, and a ranked choice general election — although some put forward just one change.
But only one of those efforts — in D.C. — was successful. Voters shot down similar efforts in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota….
Just a handful of states currently have open, all-candidate primaries, and only two use ranked choice voting statewide. In Alaska, where voters first used both systems in the midterms, an initiative is on the ballot to repeal both. It has yet to be called, but the repeal vote is currently in the lead.
An initiative in Missouri that will proactively prohibit ranked choice voting also prevailed.
Ranked Choice Voting Measures on Track to Lose in at Least Some States; Redistricting Reform Goes Down in Ohio
Richie: “Weaponizing Minor Parties: 2024 Edition”
The following is a guest post from Rob Richie:
Weaponizing Minor Parties: 2024 Edition
By Rob Richie
The presidential election will come down to which candidate wins in the seven swing states – the same closest states from 2020 that again have drawn an overwhelming share of presidential campaign spending and time. Yet every swing state ballot has more than two presidential candidates. Libertarian Chase Oliver is making Republicans nervous due to being on the ballot in all seven states, while anti-abortion activist Randall Terry is on three swing state ballots. Running from the political left, the Green Party’s Jill Stein is on six ballots (all but Nevada), and Cornel West on three. Robert Kennedy Jr. remains on two swing state ballots despite his campaign’s efforts to withdraw his name.
It’s a near certainty that the “tipping point” presidential state will be won without a majority of the vote – just as in six of the last nine presidential elections – and there will be a “Ralph Nader narrative” of a minor party splitting the vote and changing the outcome. Learning from Nader’s impact in 2000, major party donors and operatives have shamelessly sought to benefit from “spoilers” enabled by our dominant plurality, singe-choice voting method. FairVote this year has documented these tactics, while Forbes Magazine provided a valuable overview of a string of major party interventions to boost or block minor presidential candidates based on partisan calculation. I wrote about weaponization of voter choice in a similar guest blog in 2020, but this election has seen new levels of seeking to game our plurality voting rules.
As a reminder of just how bad it can get, consider a key Florida state senate race in 2020 that helped Republicans reach a supermajority needed to dominate state government. As part of a tactic used in several races. GOP operatives recruited a “ghost candidate” with the same name as the Democratic incumbent to run as an independent. He won more than 6,000 votes in a race won by the Republican by 34 votes. The fact that a key architect of the scheme, former state senator Frank Artiles, was convicted of felonies for his role didn’t change the fact that Republicans got what they wanted.
This year the Democrats have regularly sought to combat and exploit our elections’ spoiler loophole, starting with the Democratic National Committee investing in a full-time office run by Lis Smith focused on minor parties. Democrats helped push No Labels and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the race, then threw a range of legal and administrative obstacles to efforts by Jill Stein and Cornel West to get on ballots and created anti-Stein ads.
Democrats also strategically boosted conservative candidates. Democrats sought to block all minor parties from the Georgia ballot except the Libertarian nominee and Georgian Chase Oliver, while Civic Truth Action, a Super PAC with ties to the Democratic election firm Elias Law Group, recently paid for at least $1.5 million in swing state ads backing Oliver as “ a “true conservative” who will “abolish income taxes” and “dismantle the nanny state.” The New York Times reported on major Democratic spending on behalf of Operation Rescue activist Randall Terry.
Democrats have been active down the ballot as well Consider these headlines
- Dem-linked super PAC boosts third-party candidate in Pennsylvania Senate race (Politico, October 2024)
- Democrats prop up third-party candidates in three House races, (Washington Examiner, October 2024)
- Democratic donors prop up far-right candidates including Wisconsin gun activist in Senate race, (Associated Press, October 2024)
- Conservative group asks FEC to probe effort to promote spoiler candidates, (Associated Press, September 2024)
- A secretive group recruited far-right candidates in key US House races. It could help Democrats, (Associated Press, September 2024)
The Examiner story adds a particularly troubling twist. Alaska has ranked choice voting, a system designed to defang this weaponization of voter choice by giving minor candidate backers the right to indicate backup choices that will count if that candidate is eliminated by finishing last and no candidate wins a majority. Yet the Democratic-linked ad not only lifts up U.S. House candidate John Howe as the “real conservative,” but also urges voters to rank only him – essentially the equivalent of ads telling voters that this year Election Day is on Wednesday.
If not as overtly active up and down the ballot this cycle, Republicans are far from blameless. Donald Trump has called Cornel West “one of my favorite candidates” and said of the Green’s Jill Stein: “I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% from them. He takes 100%.” The GOP has done a range of major spending and litigation to boost both Stein and West, as reported in detail by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Republicans also successfully blocked the Constitution Party from the presidential ballot in the quintessential swing state of Pennsylvania.
The courts may not be immune from calculations about “spoiling” as well. After withdrawing from the race and endorsing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went from a candidate that the Democrats feared to one who might more clearly hurt Trump. Facing similar fact patterns of administrative burdens that would be created by seeking to remove Kennedy from the ballot, the Democratic-controlled state supreme courts in Michigan and Wisconsin ruled that he should stay on the presidential ballot, while conservatives on the North Carolina supreme court ruled he should come off.
So what can we do about all gaming voter choice? We don’t see anything comparable to it in countries with similar plurality voting systems like Canada and the United Kingdom, so public shaming certainly is warranted. Yet operatives arguably are just playing with the rules our leaders have the power to change. In our era of calcified partisanship and high-stakes elections, there are only so many ways to get an edge – inspiring more voters to go to the polls, changing voters’ minds, or persuading backers of the other party to stay home. In the hunt for new ways to tip close races, I expect steering votes to or away from minor parties to be an escalating tactic in our politics – and one that only deepens voter cynicism.
But we do have the power to change it. Today, voters in Alaska and Maine will vote for president and Congress with ranked choice voting (RCV) and turn the power on whether to “spoil” entirely in the hands of voters. Four more states and the District of Columbia may adopt RCV. Looking forward, we have a choice: resigning ourselves to ongoing escalation of weaponization of voter choice or ending the practice through RCV’s expanded use.
Rob Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.
“How Ranked Choice Voting Could Improve Presidential Elections”
Rob Richie for the National Civic League.
Podcast Delves into the Increased Uses of Ranked Choice Voting in the U.S. with Rob Richie
You can listen here.
Radiolab Tackles Ranked Choice Voting
“How a Man Imprisoned in New York Could Sway a Key House Race in Alaska”
NYT reports, but Rob Richie is not impressed.