> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://ivn.us/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Ranked Choice Voting “Confusion Myth” - URL: https://ivn.us/the-ranked-choice-voting-confusion-myth/ - Published: 2026-10-07T17:49:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T22:32:38.000Z - Description: Critics say ranked choice voting confuses voters, but real-world election data suggests most voters understand the system — and that ballot errors remain rare. - Author: Paul Haughey - Tags: Ranked Choice Voting, Election Reform *Editor's Note: This article* [*originally published*](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/the-ranked-choice-voting-confusion) *on the DemocracySOS Substack and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher.* Everyone has experienced an occasion in which the reasons given for opposing something are often not the real reason. Do billionaires object to higher capital gains taxes because they think it will stop investment…or because they don’t want to pay the tax? Do lumber companies object to logging regulations (through their “Save our Forests” PAC) because they care about healthy forests, or because they want to clear-cut them? Politics is no different. So, it should not be a surprise that those who have obtained power despite winning only a minority of the vote feel threatened by the “majority rule” of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Extremist minorities like being able to elect one of their kind against the wishes of the majority, and thus object to RCV. Some of them fund biased think tanks (usually with “Democracy” in the name), and those think tanks publish “studies” that are designed from the start to find some fault with RCV. And of course, anyone can publish such a “study” on the Internet without any expert or peer review at all. Naturally, the media (which often publishes tweets and doesn’t investigate much anymore) just cites the conclusion of the study without reading it. One common objection to Ranked Choice Voting is that it is too confusing, but is it really? The vast majority of people understand how to pick a second choice if their first choice of something isn’t available, whether it’s ice cream flavors or Saturday night movies. RCV is no different, and poll after poll and study after study has shown that the vast majority of voters understand how to mark a second and/or third choice of candidates in case their first choice can’t win. Let’s apply some common sense. People might complain about having to list and possibly accept their 2nd or 3rd choice, but that doesn’t mean they’re confused. Clearly, everyone knows how to pick a second or third choice when their first, i.e. favorite choice isn’t available. Thus, the only reasonable confusion would come from not understanding how the RCV “instant runoff” elimination rounds work – yet they don’t need to know those details to know how to vote and to use the system effectively. Do most people understand how their smart phone or refrigerator works? With RCV, they just need to pick their backup choices and know those will be used in a runoff if needed. Certainly most people understand how two-round runoff elections work. Even if a tiny percentage of voters are a bit confused, is that a reason not to have an electoral method that ensures majority rule? Are you not going to let anyone else have a second choice of ice cream because your grandmother is confused by having to make a second choice if the ice cream vendor doesn’t have Salty Black Licorice flavor? ## **Confusing compared to what?** Some voters are easily confused, no matter what kind of system they vote in. A [2020 study](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3660625&ref=ivn.us) by MIT’s Charles Stewart found that voters using mail-in ballots in *non*\-RCV elections saw much higher ballot invalidation rates than in RCV. Is that a reason to ban mail-in ballots? Or do the benefits outweigh the downside of having a small number of confused voters? That study concluded that, in the 2016 presidential election, as many as four percent (one out every 25) mail-in ballots were not counted, which is exponentially higher than the 0.53% of invalid ballots with RCV elections found by University of Pennsylvania’s Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley in their self-published study[Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=4670677&ref=ivn.us). Some of the common errors with mail-in ballots are: \- Voters returning their ballot after 8 p.m. on Election Day. \- Not sealing the ballot inside BOTH envelopes. \- Not signing and writing the current date on the voter’s declaration. Tolbert and Donovan in their [2013-2014 survey work](https://fairvote.org/report/2014-survey-results/?ref=ivn.us) compared voters understanding of three difference electoral methods -- RCV, plurality voting and the top-two primary -- and found voters understanding of all three systems was similar. In particular, their findings rebut the claim that minorities make more errors with RCV: “Ninety percent of African-American voters in RCV cities found ballot instructions easy to understand… a higher percent of African-American respondents reported understanding RCV in RCV cities (88%) than plurality in plurality cities (86%).” Some common errors with the widely used plurality voting method (where the voter is allowed to only vote for 1 candidate) include: \- Selecting more than one candidate, and invalidating your ballot \- Not selecting any candidates for a position \- Marking outside the designated bubble, possibly invalidating your ballot \- Not fully darkening the oval or bubble \- Not using black ink Should we ban our current plurality voting system – which is the most widely used electoral system in the United States – because some voters make these kinds of errors on their ballots? ## **Voter education eliminates confusion** As with any change to ballots, voter education is done in real RCV elections so that voters aren’t confused. But a number of “studies” have used online mock RCV elections *without* educating the voters, or have cherry-picked actual RCV elections, and reached bizarre conclusions that data from real world RCV elections did not find. In [*Choosing to “Vote As Usual”*](https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/evaluating-the-effects-of-ranked-choice-voting/choosing-to-vote-as-usual-andre-blais-carolina-plescia-and-semra-sevi?ref=ivn.us) *by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi,* two online surveys simulated elections using plurality, approval, RCV and point (Score) voting. The entire explanation for RCV was: “For this vote, rank the candidates from your first to your last choice (you do not need to rank them all). This is called the ranked vote.” That’s it. They didn’t say *why* you should rank them – that if your first choice can’t win, your vote transfers to your second choice in an “instant” runoff. They didn’t mention that RCV eliminates the spoiler effect or any other advantages. Those are the types of RCV qualities that voters learn about in an actual RCV election, when there is widespread public education, media stories and the candidates themselves educating their voters. But respondents did not learn that in this simulated election. Similarly, the study [*Voter Information Search and Ranked Choice Voting*](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374938123%5FVoter%5FInformation%5FSearch%5Fand%5FRanked%5FChoice%5FVoting?ref=ivn.us) *by* [*Theodoros Ntounias*](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdounias/?ref=ivn.us)used online surveys instead of real elections, without sufficient voter education, and came up similarly strange conclusions that were refuted by results from real-world RCV elections. Another study, [*The impact of voter confusion in ranked choice voting,*](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13366?ref=ivn.us)*by Lonna Rae Atkeson, Eli McKown-Dawson, Jack Santucci and Kyle L. Saunders,* used actual exit poll data from the 2018 Santa Fe RCV election and found that 16% of voters reported having felt very (6 percent) or somewhat (10 percent) confused; and Hispanic voters were more likely to report being confused than white voters. However, saying they felt confused doesn’t mean they made errors. The study also failed to mention that Santa Fe city officials fought RCV implementation, requiring a lawsuit that successfully forced compliance with the RCV law. But the foot dragging by the city clerk resulted in a drastic [shortening of the voter education window](http://www.fairvote.org/sf%5Fresources?ref=ivn.us) for the first election. Yet this factor was never mentioned, let alone discussed, in the Atkeson et al study. ## **Voters already pick multiple candidates for at-large plurality elections** One RCV criticism is that voters have to research and then rank multiple candidates. But the most widely used election method in the US is plurality at-large, used to elect multiple seats to bodies like city councils and school boards all across the nation. Voters are allowed as many votes as there are seats to elect, and instructed to select multiple candidates (e.g., in a citywide election to elect three seats for a city council, the voter can vote for three candidates). Voters have to decide who are their top three choices. This can be more confusing than RCV. Consequently, voters often resort to vote-wasting strategies like “bullet voting” – voting for only one or two candidates who they strongly prefer and not voting for other candidates, since a vote for a voter’s lesser-preferred candidates could actually contribute toward defeating their most-preferred candidates. But failing to use all your votes could give an advantage to voters who use all of theirs – confusing! Let the average voter try to figure all of that out. Even in single-vote, winner-take-all elections, a voter is often forced to order multiple candidates in their mind. For example, in the Democrat presidential primary in 2020, voters mentally had to rank who they liked best among Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, etc. Then it *really* got complicated – they had to factor in each candidate’s viability, since if they voted for a losing candidate, their vote was wasted. That’s a more much convoluted and confusing thought process than what a voter has to do in RCV – just rank your favorite candidates, 1, 2, 3, knowing that you can’t waste your vote. If your top choice can’t use your vote to win, your vote will transfer to your next favorite. ## **The record shows: few voters are confused in RCV elections** Pettigrew and Radley’s[Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=4670677&ref=ivn.us) claims that RCV *increases* ballot error rates by large percentages. They ignored [several](https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/3913?ref=ivn.us) other [studies](https://www.umsl.edu/~kimballd/KimballRCV.pdf?ref=ivn.us) that previously had [indicated](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8tm3s6hz?ref=ivn.us) [that](https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/3938?ref=ivn.us) [ballot](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3697637&ref=ivn.us) errors in RCV elections are similar or less than non-RCV elections, with RCV marginally higher in some races but lower in others. The Pettigrew-Radley findings claimed that 1 in 20 RCV ballots – 5% –were ‘improperly marked’ in some way. But an improperly marked ballot is not the same as making an error that invalidates that ballot. For example, voting for 2 candidates as 3rd choice is improperly marked, but if the election is decided by the second choice, it doesn’t matter. Skipping a ranking does not help the voter or candidates, but it doesn’t hurt them either because the RCV tallying just counts the next ranking, so that ballot is still valid. Another study in 2024 by two academics, Alan Parry and John Kidd, [*Deficiencies in Recent Research on Ranked Choice Voting Ballot Error Rates*](https://mathematics-democracy-institute.org/deficiencies-in-recent-research-on-ranked-choice-voting-ballot-error-rates/?ref=ivn.us), reviewed the Pettigrew-Radley study. Parry and Kidd found that 90% of those improperly marked ballots were *actually counted as intended* by the voter. And yet Pettigrew and Radley either didn’t know that – if so, that’s a huge oversight that undermines the authors’ credibility-- or never mentioned it, which undermines their fairness as well as their credibility. The actual overall average rejection rate for RCV elections was 0.53% compared to 0.04% for non-RCV elections. So the difference was 99.96% acceptance rate compared to 99.47%, both very high numbers for valid ballot rates. While the RCV error rates are indeed 10 times larger than non-RCV, *10 times a very small number is still a very small number.* But the elections selected for study by Pettigrew-Radley for some reason “happened” to have higher error rates than most RCV elections. FairVote has published data showing that in 400+ RCV races, the median first-round [overvote rate is 0.2%](https://fairvote.org/resources/data-on-rcv/?section=ballot-error&ref=ivn.us), similar to non-RCV elections. ## **Ballot exhaustion ≠ confusion** Ballot exhaustion (not ranking all the candidates) has been said to mean the voter is confused. The previously mentioned paper by [Theodoros Ntounias](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdounias/?ref=ivn.us), [*Voter Information Search and Ranked Choice Voting*](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374938123%5FVoter%5FInformation%5FSearch%5Fand%5FRanked%5FChoice%5FVoting?ref=ivn.us),says the fact that voters“under-fill their ballots, leading to exhaustion (Burnett and Kogan, 2014; Coll, 2021), is highly suggestive that voters either lack an understanding of RCV or do not invest additional time to inform themselves of the alternative candidates ….” However, that’s a false conclusion. It may also mean the voter doesn’t support some candidates, and thus did not rank all or even most of them. Ranking candidates is an option, the voter gets to decide. Another common criticism of RCV is that candidates must rank all the candidates, and thus research them all which is too much work for many voters. But this is simply false, and the “instructions to voters” on RCV ballots make this clear, saying the voter can rank as many or as few candidates as she/he wishes. In conclusion, the error rates for RCV are small, are similar to non-RCV elections, and are no reason not to adopt majority rule in your elections by incorporating RCV. Similar confusion is seen in existing plurality elections, yet it is not used as a criticism because the public is used to these defects of the plurality system and so think it’s just “normal” for elections. Those criticizing RCV as confusing have no credible studies and few election examples to point to that support this erroneous claim. A handful of academic critics who are promoting a competitor voting method have published or promoted studies with confused methodologies that contradict studies based on real-world RCV elections (see [here](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/shaky-political-science-misses-mark), [here](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/shaky-political-science-in-minnesota), [here](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/shaky-political-science-using-simulated) and [here](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/shaky-political-science-breakdown)). Other critics benefit from the current plurality system, where candidates are elected by divisively appealing to their minority of core supporters. None of these critics are willing to acknowledge that ranked ballots add something [useful and even special](https://democracysos.substack.com/p/the-miracle-of-rcvs-ranked-ballots) to our elections, including ensuring majority winners, getting rid of spoiler candidates, and liberating voters to pick their favorite candidates instead of having to settle for the lesser of two evils. That’s why over 50 US jurisdictions at federal, state and local levels use Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to elect officeholders with a majority of the vote in a single election.