Editor's Note: The following op-ed originally published on the Expand Democracy Substack and was republished as a stand-alone piece by request and with permission from the author.
Every four years, Americans experience a massive lesson in the power of electoral rules: the presidential nomination process.
The schedule of contests means early primary states may get literally 100 times more attention from candidates than states voting later. A timely early win can create unstoppable momentum when it’s soon before “Super Tuesday.” as February primary winners like Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2016 have shown.
Republicans allowing a mix of primaries where delegates are allocated proportionally and by winner-take-all often leads candidates to chase “all or nothing” outcomes in the winner-take-all states. Yet such rules can be changed relatively easily by states and the parties themselves.
I’ll zero in on a change that I believe is an inevitable norm: a ranked choice voting ballot (as opposed to “ranked choice voting” in itself) to handle increasingly crowded fields by allowing a voter’s second or lower choice to count if their first choice isn't viable - as persuasively called for by Congressman Jamie Raskin just last week in The Guardian.
Both parties have those who resist change, to be sure, but here’s why it makes so much sense for both Democrats and Republicans.
- For both parties, using an RCV ballot has “centripetal” impacts on rewarding candidates able to build consensus support across their party, as both parties traditionally shaped at in-person conventions and as Democrats carried over to caucuses where voters “realign” to viable second choices after indicating their initial preference.
- Both parties have primary calendars where a string of contests happen soon after early primaries result in many candidates dropping out. Nearly all states also now have generous early voting rules – ones that increase turnout by expanding voting access, but that undercut voting rights when combined with candidate withdrawals – leading to some three million Democrats in 2020 voting for candidates who had withdrawn by the time those votes were counted.
- Democrats have a strict requirement for proportional representation across all states, with statewide delegates allocated to any candidate earning at least 15%. That makes winner-take-all forms of RCV a non-starter with Democrats. But 15% is a high number, and millions of votes are “ineffective” because they are below the threshold. Embracing a caucus-like ”realignment” rule with ranked ballots would allow those voters to get a chance to have their vote count. That is, you would count all first choices, then, in the realignment round, move all ballots cast for nonviable candidates below the 15% threshold to their next-ranked viable choice. In 2020, about 90% of such voters in the four states providing data about how voters used their ranked ballots had their ballots count toward viable candidates. Translated across all states, that would be a huge win for voting rights and likely result in more votes making a difference than any other reform.
- Republicans drive toward faster selection of nominees by allowing states to hold winner-take–all contests after their early contests are decided based on proportional representation. But when those winner-take-all contests have more than two candidates, you get winners with far less than half the vote - a dynamic that was clearly unrepresentative of voter opinion in 2016, as FairVote demonstrated conclusively. Republicans wanting a more reliably representative outcome would benefit from RCV.
How RCV might become the norm in presidential primaries
Widespread use of ranked choice voting for these reasons will depend above all on faster, cheaper, and better election administration of RCV. Most cities have met that goal with transparency, audits, election-night tallies, and voters embracing RCV ballots.
Moving those practices statewide can take more investment, but that journey is well underway. Once RCV is as quick and easy to use as non-RCV elections, it will become a relatively non-controversial choice for states and parties.
As to viability, a lot of Republicans are pouting about RCV because Democrats won hotly contested congressional elections with RCV in Alaska in 2022 and Maine in 2018. But blanket opposition is irrational, and Republicans’ experience with RCV in nomination contests has been uniformly positive, as in the Republican Party of Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial nomination.
Over time, I expect Republicans will embrace the practical strength of RCV, including in presidential primaries.
For Democrats, this is a key cycle for their commitment to voting rights. FairVote’s polling shows a remarkably broad and high level of support for RCV among Democratic voters, including a margin of greater than 10 to one for its voters under 50.
Democrats also have a great lesson from 2020 showing that RCV ballots work, which is why many of their state party leaders want to use RCV ballots in 2028. With numerous state parties that run their own contests wanting to do vote-by-mail with RCV, national Democrats would do well to get out of their way and simply spell out clearly the acceptable rules for using RCV ballots to make more votes count.
I've drawn on my coauthored 2021 academic article Lessons from the Use of Ranked Choice Voting in American Presidential Primaries in Politics and Governance for Cogitatio Press that you might want to read in full. Here’s the abstract:
Grounded in experience in 2020, both major political parties have reasons to expand use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in their 2024 presidential primaries. RCV may offer a ‘win-win’ solution benefiting both the parties and their voters. RCV would build on both the pre-1968 American tradition of parties determining a coalitional presidential nominee through multiple ballots at party conventions and the modern practice of allowing voters to effectively choose their nominees in primaries. Increasingly used by parties around the world in picking their leaders, RCV may allow voters to crowd-source a coalitional nominee.
Most published research about RCV focuses on state and local elections. In contrast, this article analyzes the impact on voters, candidates, and parties from five state Democratic parties using RCV in party-run presidential nomination contests in 2020. First, it uses polls and results to examine how more widespread use of RCV might have affected the trajectory of contests for the 2016 Republican nomination. Second, it contrasts how more than three million voters in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries backed withdrawn candidates with the low rate of such wasted votes for withdrawn candidates in the states with RCV ballots. Finally, it concludes with an examination of how RCV might best interact with the parties’ current rules and potential changes to those rules.