Pro 1: Ranked-choice voting is often a less expensive form of voting and one that ensures that winners have some level of support from the majority of voters.

In many state elections, if no candidate receives a majority of the votes, a second runoff election is held between the top two candidates from the first round. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) eliminates the need for this second round of campaigning and voting—voters only vote once, saving the cost of another round of voting and tabulations.[14]

Moreover, though the winning candidate in a ranked-choice election may not have been the majority’s first choice, the winning candidate will have been a ranked choice (second or maybe third) of the majority.

Fair Vote says:

Each vote is precious and should count to the full extent possible. RCV yields election outcomes that better represent voter preferences. Winners elected with RCV have majority support and truly represent their communities—meaning a stronger mandate to govern, or stronger nominees in primary elections.[3]

Pro 2: Ranked-choice voting increases voter voice and choice, offering a more diverse pool of candidates.

With ranked-choice voting, if a voter’s first choice doesn’t win, that person’s vote is assigned to his or her second choice automatically. This allows voters to have more input than a one-and-done system.[3]

As Eveline Dowling and Caroline Tolbert wrote for the American Bar Association:

Candidates who had hesitated to enter a race for fear of being a spoiler may be more willing to enter an RCV [ranked-choice voting] race.…In plurality [voting], voters of a particular ideological persuasion may stick with a disliked candidate because if only some of them shift to a replacement on their side, they could end up allowing the other side’s candidate to win. In RCV (where vote-splitting is less of a concern) they are freer to shift to a better alternative.[4]

Ranked-choice voting can even encourage more candidates to run, especially minorities, offering the public a more diverse pool of candidates. “RCV makes it easier for women and candidates of color to run for office and win,” reports Fair Vote. “With RCV, candidates aren’t pressured to wait their turn, nor are they perceived as ‘spoilers.’ Research finds that candidates of color are more likely to win RCV elections, particularly in races featuring multiple candidates of color.”[3]

Pro 3: Ranked-choice voting decreases negative campaigning, encourages candidates to campaign beyond their base, and increases voter turnout.

In a ranked-choice election, if a candidate runs a negative campaign about an opponent, the candidate risks alienating voters who favor the opponent and thus losing a second- or third-ranked vote.[5]

Furthermore, candidates are more likely to engage in voter outreach, beyond their traditional base of support, in order to obtain a majority in a second-ranked vote, and this additional engagement increases voter turnout. Rebecca Noecker, a member of the City Council in Saint Paul, Minnesota, explained that while running for office, she “door knocked a number of people who had signs up for [her] opponent.…The conversation didn’t have to stop because they had already pledged to someone else.” A candidate may not have won that voter on the first round of voting but could still win that vote in the second or third round of voting.[4]

As the Campaign Legal Center explains,

RCV forces candidates to abandon negative campaign tactics because candidates not only need the first choice support of their supporters, but also the second and third choice support from voters who prefer other candidates. A study has shown that jurisdictions with RCV have experienced friendlier campaigns and majority support in the cities using it.[12]

Voter engagement and political dialogue are multiplied in ranked-choice voting, and that’s good for democracy.

Con 1: Ranked-choice voting can eliminate the candidate with the most first-place votes, favor moderate candidates with only marginal support, and encourage scheming to get around these limitations.

The winner in a ranked-choice election is the person who has received a majority of all votes in thefinal round. If the election process goes through several rounds, the candidate with the majority of votes in the first round may be eliminated. As Aaron Hamlin of the Center for Election Science explains:

Much of the time ranked-choice voting [RCV] isn’t getting any kind of majority at all. Rather, it’s contriving a majority by artificially narrowing down the candidate field. RCV knocks out candidates over each round, but sometimes it knocks out good candidates by mistake.[6]

Furthermore, candidates or voters may engage in schemes to tilt favor to one candidate or another, something that’s not at all far-fetched in the age of social media. For example, Hans von Spakovsky and J. Adams of the Heritage Foundation speculate:

If enough Ross Perot voters [1992 U.S. presidential election] had listed George H. W. Bush as their second choice over Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush might have won that presidential election instead of Clinton. Since Perot came in third in the race, his votes with Bush as the second choice would have counted for Bush in the second round of vote tabulation.[13]

RCV provides “voters with an incentive to tactically game the system and falsify their preferences for candidates,” so their “real” choice survives to the next round and can win in the end.[13]

Con 2: Ranked-choice voting disenfranchises voters, limiting their choices and “exhausting” their ballots.

Although voters are able, and perhaps encouraged, to rank all candidates on their ballots, they do not always do so. Some voters may only support one or two candidates and find ranking candidates with whom they disagree strongly distasteful or even immoral.[13]

When the candidates on a voter’s ballot have been eliminated by the ranked-choice process, that ballot is “exhausted,” and that voter is effectively disenfranchised.[7]

A study of more than 600,000 ballots from four local elections found that the rate of ballot exhaustion ranged from 9.6 percent to 27.1 percent. This amounted to, according to the authors of the study, “a substantial number of votes being discarded in each election.”[7]

Any voting system that tosses out votes and voters, or that reassigns a voter’s vote to a candidate the voter objects to for the creation of a fake majority, is wholly undemocratic.

Con 3: Ranked-choice voting complicates voting, delays results, and is more vulnerable to corruption.

In 2016 California Gov. Jerry Brown, Jr., vetoed a bill to expand ranked-choice voting in his state, calling it “overly complicated and confusing”; it “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.” The conservative Heritage Foundation agreed with the Democratic governor, comparing ranked voting to a shifty supermarket:

Imagine if…at checkout the cashier swaps out your bottle of Heinz 57 with the cheap generic you ranked dead last. Why? Well, the majority of shoppers also down-voted it, but there was no clear front-runner, so the generic snuck up from behind with enough down ballot picks to win. In fact, in this ranked choice supermarket, you might even have helped the lousy generic brand win.[13]

Moreover, ranked voting delays results. If no candidate wins a majority, the subsequent rounds of tabulation have to wait until all valid ballots have been counted. In Alaska, which uses ranked-choice voting for all elections, the second and later rounds of counting cannot even begin until 15 days after the election because the state continues to count absentee ballots.[8][9][10]

Finally, whenever additional rounds of tabulation are added to an election, the risk of election fraud is compounded, especially if the election is a national one. “Under a national popular vote, RCV faces enormous technical hurdles,” writes the Center for Election Science. “The nature of RCV tabulation requires that all the ballot data be centralized for tabulation. This creates both security and logistical concerns.…You’d [also] have to deal with holdout states still using our choose-one [candidate] method.…But you can’t add RCV and regular choose-one ballots together. It just doesn’t work.”[6]