Ranked-choice voting is an elections-administration nightmare

All over the country, liberal activists are prodding cities and states to replace ordinary elections with the left’s newest “democracy-saving” fad: ranked-choice voting (RCV). They promise that RCV is a simple system, for voters and for the officials charged with running elections.

They couldn’t be more wrong. RCV imposes huge changes on the mechanics of planning and running elections. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

RCV makes voting harder and more confusing. That complexity leads to long lines, delayed results, and inevitable tabulation mistakes. And once those tabulation mistakes are made, RCV inherently makes it more difficult to detect and fix them. The complexity and logistical hurdles imposed by RCV make it harder not only on voters but also on our already overtaxed election administration officials and poll workers.

RCV pushes voters to rank each candidate for each office, from first to last. To win the race, a candidate must get over 50 percent. If no one reaches 50 percent in the initial count, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to each voter’s second choice — assuming the voter listed one. If he did not (and many voters do not) then his ballot is thrown out — what RCV proponents call “ballot exhaustion.”

With each round of elimination, there are fewer ballots, and the process repeats until one candidate gets over 50 percent of votes that haven’t been thrown out.

If you are confused, you aren’t alone. RCV is so complex that New York City was forced to spend $15 million to educate voters on how to vote.

RCV’s advocates often ignore its major logistical hurdles, such as the long lines it creates in polling places. Voting lines are subject to many factors, including the number of polling locations, check-in stations, and voting machines. But another driver of lines is the amount of time a person spends voting. When a voter lingers in the booth, lines grow. In November 2022, voters in Harris County, Texas were faced with one of the longest ballots in the nation. The elections administrator estimated that each voter would take between seven and ten minutes to vote.

This was without RCV. Imagine now if that same voter had to rank up to five candidates in every race. The time to vote could easily double, swelling lines and potentially deterring voters.

RCV elections have been marred by weeks-long delays in declaring winners. For example, in New York City’s 2021 Democratic Mayoral Primary it took 15 days to declare a winner. More recently, in Alaska’s November 2022 General Election it took even longer to tabulate the votes and declare the winners. And these races were even not particularly close.

The truth, is long wait times are built into RCV. Candidate elimination cannot begin until every ballot has been returned. That means that every provisional, mail, military, and absentee ballot must be returned and processed before one can even begin tabulating. Provisional ballots present problems, but mail-in ballots are much worse. In nineteen states, mail-in ballots can be accepted after election day. This includes Illinois, which allows a whopping two weeks for mail-in ballots to be returned. For each of these states, the counting process cannot even begin until these deadlines pass.

The delays get even worse if there are recounts. And RCV makes recounts and lawsuits more likely. Each round of elimination could be narrowly decided, and a mere change in the order in which low-ranking candidates are eliminated could change the outcome of the entire election. 

RCV advocates often insist that election delays are mere nuisances, but they present real problems for election security and voter confidence. We count ballots on election night for a reason, as it denies bad actors an opportunity to stuff ballot boxes. The delays caused by RCV annihilate this natural safeguard. Every extra day that ballots sit presents an opportunity for ballots to appear, disappear, or just get lost, and for public doubt to creep in. 

Even if RCV could deliver prompt results, simply counting votes correctly has proven difficult. RCV has even led to false outcomes. 

In California, the wrong winner was declared in a school board race utilizing RCV last fall. The loser was seated for three months before the correct winner prevailed in his court case. The mistakes that led to this debacle would have been easily spotted in a traditional election, but they were missed because of RCV.

RCV is complicated for both voters and elections administrators. It is simply too cumbersome to adopt. Right-minded people should not be duped into embracing it.

Chad Ennis, a former director of the Forensic Audit Division for the Texas Secretary of State, is vice president of the Honest Elections Project.