Rob Richie
Editor’s Note: This commentary piece was originally part of Expand Democracy’s weekly newsletter and was converted into a stand-alone op-ed on IVN by request of and with permission from the author.
Democratic National Committee insiders are poised to ban the use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in selecting their presidential nominee in 2028 – overriding presidential primary laws in Maine and Washington, D.C, and squashing great interest in this use of RCV among state legislators and the many state parties who run their own primaries.
Presidential primaries are among the most compelling use cases for RCV. They draw crowded fields of candidates that voters get to know and are eager to rank rather than be limited to one. Parties must unite their big tent of voters, and RCV rewards unifying candidates. The sequential nature of primaries is a problematic fit with early voting – in 2020, for example, more than three million Democratic voters cast a ballot for a candidate who had withdrawn before that vote was counted.
Shawn Griffiths
But the senior citizens who dominate the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) reflect the conservatism I’ve found among many older people on adopting RCV. The age gap in support for RCV is breathtaking. While that makes me optimistic for the future of RCV as a reform, it reflects a short-term challenge in a nation that too often looks and acts like a gerontocracy.
Even among seniors, however, support for RCV is strong among Democrats. Maine, for example, has the nation’s oldest median age, yet its voters adopted RCV for state and congressional elections on the ballot in 2016, ratified that support in a 2018 referendum, and had its legislature extend RCV to presidential primaries and general elections heading into 2020. A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that among registered Democrats in Maine, the state’s RCV law is supported by an overwhelming 84% to 6% margin.
Maine’s Democratic Party leaders of course want to keep using RCV for presidential primaries. Washington, D.C. voters are also enthusiastic about RCV after its successful rollout in primaries this June in the wake of 73% of voters passing RCV for all DC elections, including the 2028 presidential primaries. State Democratic Party leaders in Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming used RCV in 2020 and want to use it again, as do other states like Iowa.
But the Rules and Bylaws Committee recently passed language mirroring the position of national Republicans who voted to block use of RCV after the GOP in the U.S. Virgin Islands used RCV in 2024. The proposed rule would ignore any rankings on an RCV ballot by only awarding delegates based on first choices. While some RBC members are protesting that this proposed rule is not a “ban,” that’s disingenuous. It would be analogous to a rule that vote-by-mail ballots could be cast in a presidential primary, but only in person votes would count toward awarding delegates. That would as effectively ban vote-by-mail as the proposed rule bans RCV.
The RBC’s surprise attack on RCV was organized by Frank Leone, a long-time opponent of RCV who had badly lost local battle about using RCV among Democrats in his previous city of Arlington (VA) and his current home of Washington, D.C.
Leone’s tactic was to mislead RBC colleagues that RCV is somehow incompatible with the party’s long-time proportional representation requirement. That claim is absolutely false, yet RBC leaders like Leone and RBC co-chair Jim Roosevelt have shamelessly made that argument in Maine news articles about the controversy.