Should the US Adopt Ranked-Choice Voting?
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The spoiler effect — where a third-party candidate splits the vote with the ideologically closer major-party candidate and elects the one both disliked most — is a structural defect in plurality voting. Ralph Nader in 2000, Ross Perot in 1992, and dozens of state-level races show this. RCV eliminates it mathematically: your second choice activates only if your first is eliminated.
The spoiler effect is overblown: strong third-party candidates appear in only a fraction of elections, and the solution — ballot access reform, open primaries — can be achieved without the complexity of RCV. Approval voting achieves most of the anti-spoiler benefit with much simpler ballot mechanics and counting that can be done by hand.
RCV forces candidates to build broader coalitions — you need to be the second choice of your opponents' voters to survive. That structural incentive rewards candidates who run issue-focused, less negative campaigns. Studies of Australian elections (which have used RCV nationally since 1918) show lower negative campaigning rates than equivalent US races.
New York City's 2021 mayoral primary under RCV saw weeks of counting, multiple erroneous results, and a final outcome that differed from initial results — creating widespread public confusion about who won. Election administrators in smaller counties lack the software and training to run RCV reliably; scaling it federally would require massive infrastructure investment.
Alaska adopted RCV in 2022 and elected Mary Peltola, ending 50 years of Republican dominance in its House seat. Post-election surveys showed voters understood the system and approval of the process was high. The claim that RCV confuses voters is not supported by the evidence from jurisdictions that have adopted it.
RCV violates majority rule: the Condorcet paradox shows that in certain vote distributions, it's possible to elect a candidate who would lose head-to-head against any individual opponent. "Exhausted ballots" — where a voter's rankings are all eliminated before the final round — mean not all voters participate equally in the final decision.
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