Ranked Choice Voting Sucks.

1. RCV gets repealed

2. Complexity: Nobody trusts elections where the candidate who got the most #1 votes in the first round loses.

3. RCV throws away ballots to achieve a "majority"

4. Implementing RCV costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and election officials make mistakes when running it.

5. Implementing RCV takes years

6. Ranked Choice Voting has become a liberal issue, despite being a non-partisan method.

7. Multiple Failed Elections - Burlington, VT; Moab, UT; Alaska; and more have had the wrong candidates win in public elections

8. Under RCV, your full support could go behind a candidate you ranked second to last.

9. County Clerks think that Ranked Choice Voting is bad.

10. Mathematicians and Election Scientists think that Ranked Choice Voting is bad.

11. 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Where RCV has been repealed

• Aspen, Colorado - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2010.

• Burlington, Vermont - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2010.

• Pierce County, Washington - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2009.

• Cary, North Carolina - Repealed Ranked Choice Voting in 2012.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

• 10 municipalities in Utah in 2023.

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

• ABC7News 12/29/2022: Alameda County finds error in ranked-choice voting system, investigating Oakland school board race

• 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

Doesn't guarantee an unspoiled election

RCV leads to the same Vote Split / Two Party system it's trying to solve

Election Experts hate it

• Utah Association of County Clerks

• Oregon Association of County Clerks

Evidence

• Heritage Foundation - Ranked Choice Voting Is a Bad Choice 

• Voter Participation with Ranked Choice Voting in the United States - David C. Kimball - University of Missouri