What Do You Think about Ranked Choice Voting?

My long-time readers know how I feel about ranked choice voting. It is a voting process pushed by Senator Lisa Murkowski’s assistants that made sure that she was re-elected. It also ensured that Alaska, a state that is two-thirds Republicans, is now represented by a Democrat. I was gratified to see that Fred Lucas at The Daily Signal has investigated ranked choice voting. 

Ranked choice voting, in which voters rank candidates on a ballot rather than choose one, may harm black and Native American voters disproportionately, according to a new study by a Princeton University professor.

Minority candidates also may be undercut by ranked choice voting, said Noan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and vice dean for academic assessment.

McCarty did the study for the Center for Election Confidence, previously known as the Lawyers Democracy Fund, which says it is the first academic study of the subject by a mainstream, nonpartisan source.

The study determined that with ranked choice voting, African American voters in New York City and Alaska Natives were most likely to have their votes disqualified in later rounds of counting at a higher rate than white voters, diminishing minorities’ electoral influence. “Ballot exhaustion” is a term used by election watchers to describe a ballot that is discarded if a voter ranks only candidates who end up being eliminated from contention.

“It’s not deliberate. This wasn’t a rationale by the advocates for adopting ranked choice voting,” McCarty told The Daily Signal. “But there was an indifference by advocates to the history that runoffs were adopted in some southern states to reduce the influence of minority votes.”

The study comes ahead of Jan. 23, which the advocacy group Rank the Vote dubs RCV Day as a way to promote ranked choice voting nationally.

Ranked choice voting has become among the most contentious battles in election law in recent years, as several state legislatures either consider it or ban it.

As of the 2022 elections, the system was used in a total of 62 jurisdictions, including statewide in Alaska and Maine as well as New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center.

Seven local jurisdictions in California, more than 20 jurisdictions in Utah, five cities in Minnesota, four cities in Colorado, three jurisdictions in Massachusetts, two cities in Michigan, and two jurisdictions in New Mexico use the system for local elections, according to Rank the Vote.

Kansas and Wyoming use ranked choice voting in presidential primary elections. In several states, only one city uses the methods….

The Princeton professor’s study examined Democrats’ primary in New York City as well as Alaska’s statewide elections.

“I find that exhaustion rates in the NYC Democratic primaries for executive office were higher in precincts with high concentrations of minority (black, Asian, and Hispanic) primary voters than they were in predominantly white precincts,” McCarty says in the report.

He adds: “In the executive office primaries, the proportion of voters ranking only a single candidate was generally higher in minority precincts.”

The study found similar results in Alaska’s statewide races.

“The results in Alaska largely confirm those of NYC for heavily Alaskan Native precincts,” the study says. “Their exhaustion rates were higher in all statewide races and for state legislative races except in the case of the U.S. House election which featured a co-ethnic winner.” … [Emphasis added.]

Alaskan Natives had no problems with the election of Mary Peltola to represent Alaska in Congress because she is an Alaskan Native. She also was the only Democrat on the ballot. The Democrats took advantage of the voting system and ran only on candidate, while Republicans had several candidates.

Without ranked choice voting, Lisa Murkowski would not be re-elected, and Mary Peltola would not be elected – and Alaska and America would be in a better position.