Ranked Choice Voting Sucks.
RCV gets repealed
Complexity: Nobody trusts elections where the candidate who got the most #1 votes in the first round loses.
RCV throws away ballots to achieve a "majority"
Implementing RCV costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and election officials make mistakes when running it.
Implementing RCV takes years
Ranked Choice Voting has become a liberal issue, despite being a non-partisan method.
Multiple Failed Elections - Burlington, VT; Moab, UT; Alaska; and more have had the wrong candidates win in public elections
Under RCV, your full support could go behind a candidate you ranked second to last.
County Clerks think that Ranked Choice Voting is bad.
Mathematicians and Election Scientists think that Ranked Choice Voting is bad.
Voided ballots are common, even in jurisdictions that have been using RCV for over a decade.
Where RCV has been repealed
Aspen, Colorado - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2010.
Burlington, Vermont - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2010.
Pierce County, Washington - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2009.
Cary, North Carolina - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2012.
Sunnyvale, CA
Hendersonville, NC
Eastpointe, MI
Complexity
Of all major ballot types seriously being considered, explicit ranking is the most cognitively taxing
The tally consists of a flow chart of multiple conditional statements and is often misexplained to voters
RCV can not guarantee majority winners
You can't throw away people's votes and then say the winner now has a majority.
The term "majority" in Ranked-Choice Voting refers to a majority of the remaining votes, not a majority of the total votes cast. In RCV, if no candidate secures a majority of first-preference votes in the initial count, the elimination process begins, removing the candidate with the fewest votes. The votes of the eliminated candidate are then redistributed to the next preferred candidates on those voters' ballots. This process continues until a candidate obtains a majority of the votes left in play. Not a majority of people who voted.
Expensive
Difficult to Implement
Errors in Administration
Politico 07/06/2021: New York’s ‘head-swirling’ mistake puts harsh spotlight on ranked-choice voting
Polarizing
San Francisco went from 1.5 parties to 1
RCV causes Australia's lower house to be two-party dominated despite a multi-party upper house