CNN has a piece raising this issue. In response, Michael Parsons (Senior Legal Fellow at Fair Vote) and David Daley (Senior Fellow, Fair Vote) have written this guest post for ELB:

Maine values its long history of independent politics, electing independents as governor and to the U.S. Senate and being first in the nation to adopt ranked choice voting for statewide use. So it is no surprise that the Maine legislature eventually adopted ranked choice voting for president as well, eager to have the best of both worlds: Freedom of choice, and no fear of “spoilers” creating an unrepresentative winner. 

At a time when many are anxious about the impact RFK, Jr., Cornel West, Chase Oliver, and Jill Stein might have on the race, both Maine and Alaska are showing the rest of the country a better path forward.

Yet, CNN this week expressed a much different anxiety: They worried that the crowded presidential field and the voting method – call it RFK and RCV – would slow down networks’ ability to call a winner and delay the projection of the 2024 race, because Maine is unlikely to run its RCV tabulation until a few days after Election Day. 

To be sure, timely results matter. In an information-rich world, dead air can quickly fill with wild rumors. Whether healthy or not, voters have come to expect unofficial results to post early and update often – with major networks making “calls” (or “too close to calls”) soon after.

But none of this is reason for CNN – or anyone – to wring their hands over RCV.  There’s no great mystery to making a call in an RCV election. It’s close elections that take time. 

For example, it took the networks several days to make final calls in Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2020 – because the margins remained so tight. Those were not RCV races. There were multiple states, meanwhile, which didn’t finish counting all their votes on election night where CNN and others had no difficulty at all projecting a winner without all the numbers. California, New York and Oregon may not finish counting for weeks this November, but we will still immediately know who won on November 5. 

It’s simply not that hard to make an RCV projection, even if no candidate wins 50% of voters’ first choices. In Alaska in 2022, Mary Peltola led 49%-26% in first choices, yet no networks projected before the final count. They likely could have, however, the same way they make other calls, by trusting their data and experience. Peltola won, unsurprisingly, by 10 points. 

On the other side of the country, Maine congressman Jared Golden finished with 48.5% of first choices but effectively declared victory five days before the RCV tally. This is perfectly normal, just as most declarations (and concessions!) arrive before the official canvass and certification process is complete. Golden could feel confident in this call because the margins were on his side: He won 53%-47%. Notably, both the first and final-round results almost exactly matched a SurveyUSA poll fielded the week before the election; this poll could inform network projections just as exit polls do for contests using traditional, choose-one voting. 

Maine might be very close on election night. But the most recent polling shows Harris with 48 percent, Trump 40, Kennedy 6 and a smattering for Chase Oliver (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Greens). With a margin that large, CNN’s data desk – expert on historical patterns of voter behavior – should still be able to project the state that night without any concern.

Of course, media outlets might feel more comfortable in their projections if states released their preliminary RCV results on a rolling basis – just as jurisdictions do in choose-one elections and just as most cities using RCV do today. Alaska and Maine are unusual states in that they have outdated and sometimes creaky procedures around hand counts and the announcement of results. Election officials, as always, should modernize their practices in order to release the most accurate results in the fastest time frame. Unfortunately, Maine and Alaska don’t… yet. 

Ultimately though, delays will always be a problem anywhere old-fashioned procedures or late-arriving ballots meet nailbiter elections – look at the two-week count in Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s pre-RCV 2010 re-election, or the month-long 2022 count in California’s closest U.S. House election. RCV is not the issue.

But just as election officials can do better, decision desks can update their practices as well. RCV is used in a growing number of cities, and will be on the ballot this fall in several more states. It is here to stay: Decision desks need to adjust as voters demand an electoral system that gives them more power.

To be sure, by making every vote count, RCV might make some races more competitive than they used to be—and more competitive races can be closer races.  But that’s a boon for our democracy.  And if it means the media might take a bit longer before calling that race on election night, it will be a result well worth the wait.

In the end, ranked-choice elections can be called just as soon as comparably close single-choice elections. Once decision desks try, they’ll find projecting RCV races to be just as easy as voters find casting a ranked ballot.