How I Updated my Views on Ranked Choice Voting

I was once an enthusiastic supporter of ranked choice voting (RCV).1 Today, I see its potential impacts as much more limited. 

I had once hoped RCV would enable and encourage new and different types of political organizing and engagement. I believed it could begin to arrest and even start to reverse the destructive two-party doom loop in national politics. I no longer believe it can. I now see other reforms that encourage new party organizing (specifically fusion and open-list proportional representation) as more urgent both because they are more likely to break the two-party doom loop and because they are more likely to engage and empower diverse citizens for the longer-term. 

I still see a valuable role for RCV in primary elections and local nonpartisan elections. But my overall enthusiasm has waned. 

I’ve laid out my current thinking about why healthy and multiple political parties are central to  sustainable democracy reform – and why we should prioritize pro-parties reform –  in more detail in my long report, More Parties, Better Parties, as well as a shorter Washington Post op-ed and elsewhere in this substack.  As I’ve argued in these pieces, I see fusion and open-list PR (not RCV) as the reforms most likely to move us towards more and better parties. “Will it improve our party system?” is the standard by which I now judge reform for national and state partisan elections.

What follows here are mostly reflections on my personal trajectory, and some musings about how and why to change one’s mind. I am speaking only for myself here.

I don’t love having to revise my views publicly. We live in a political culture that treats too many honest changes of heart as either opportunism, hypocrisy, or both. 

However, sometimes we change our minds as we learn, question, and debate the merits of competing policies and ideas. It’s how change happens. 

I believe strongly in pluralist, liberal democracy. And pluralist, liberal democracy depends on all of us hearing and engaging with arguments that challenge our views from time to time. This doesn’t mean questioning everything all the time. But it does mean being open to the possibility that some of the time, on some important questions, you might not have it all figured out, and you might learn new things that will lead you to update your views. And if those of us who write and think publicly about democracy can’t sometimes publicly change our minds, then who will?

It took a lot to convince me I had miscalculated. I was going on my best judgment when I first endorsed RCV, back in 2016.  Initially, I fought hard against the conclusions that went counter to my expectations, dismissing them as bad research. Typical confirmation bias. But eventually, what I was reading and seeing was hard to reconcile with my mental models that RCV could make a significant difference. Eventually, it made more sense to update my views than to hold them in the face of mounting evidence against them.

I do not mean to suggest that RCV doesn't have a productive role in democracy reform. It seems particularly apt for multi-candidate primaries, and crowded nonpartisan local elections. But compared to seven years ago, when I first learned about it, today I see RCV as a marginal and limited intervention – no longer a stepping-stone reform that will lead to other bigger reforms. 

Instead, I see RCV as a modest tweak to solve a problem of over-crowded primary or nonpartisan elections that lead to narrow plurality victories. It can help ensure that, for example, in a six-way primary for an open congressional seat, the winner isn't an extremist with only 26 percent support. RCV in a party primary ensures that the ultimate nominee enjoys reasonably broad support among the party faithful.  These sorts of elections are not all that common, but when they happen, it’d be good to have an RCV system. However, in the vast majority of elections, the RCV winner and the plurality winner are the same.2

The big problem in our politics right now is not that plurality candidates occasionally win elections with only 40 percent or 45 percent support. The big problem is that we have a hyper-polarized two-party system in which opposing partisans see each other as such a dangerous enemy that winning elections at any cost has become more important than maintaining a democracy. This problem has grown considerably worse since 2016. The enormity of the problem demands something bolder than a modest tweak. 

My RCV journey, Part I: 2016-2020.  growing enthusiasm

I first encountered RCV in 2016, when I learned about the efforts to bring RCV to Maine. Upon some initial research and conversations, it seemed like a good idea. So I wrote about it, with some enthusiasm. 

Trump's victory in the 2016 election surprised us all. Like many people, I went looking for explanations and answers. 

Much of that intellectual journey is reflected in my book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. I concluded the two-party system and our winner-take-all elections were a key problem. And RCV seemed like a promising and maybe even realistic way to reverse some of the hyper-partisan polarization. Perhaps, it would allow some new parties to get a foothold, to start to shake up the system, and bootstrap change from there. Maine had narrowly approved RCV in 2016. Perhaps this was the start of something bigger?

The Maine RCV victory in 2016, and subsequent reaffirmation in 2018 after the state legislature tried to kill it, put RCV on the map. And since I had been writing about it with enthusiasm, I started getting known as a go-to expert. My best judgment at the time, based on what I had read and the conversations I was having, was that RCV was a very positive change, worth heartily supporting. 

Though I was more enthusiastic about proportional representation and multiparty democracy as the most important and necessary reforms of all, such changes felt very far off back in the late 2010s. RCV, marketed appropriately as a relatively minor change, seemed like it might be the "gateway drug" to more substantial electoral reforms, as well as having numerous immediate-term benefits. 

But as happens with any reform, there is a strong tendency to oversell once you get into advocacy mode. Headline writers and opinion editors and campaigners want the strongest-claim version of the argument. No campaign was ever won on the slogan, “here’s a minor change that has some benefits and some costs, but on balance the costs outweigh the benefits, and don’t get too excited that this will really change anything in your life, because it actually won’t.”

Hence the trope, "Can ranked-choice voting save American democracy?". Everybody wants that "one weird trick" that makes a hard problem seem easy. 

It was good to be an expert on the hot new reform idea. A lot of great, earnest humans shared the enthusiasm. It felt like a ray of hope in a dark time. RCV reformers are smart people, who care deeply about our democracy and want to make it fairer and more representative. I enjoyed being part of the community. 

As RCV gained more interest, questions grew. Academic studies were still thin. Australia’s experience with RCV was positive, but Australia was Australia. It had a long history with RCV going back to 1918. It also had mandatory voting. 

In 2018, New America convened a group of funders and activists to discuss questions and concerns. Eventually, we pulled together a research project, which we called the Electoral Reform Research Group (ERRG). We commissioned 16 academic projects to ask some of the hard questions and claims being made on behalf of RCV. 

One unique thing we did, which I still see as a model, is that before the researchers embarked on their studies in earnest, we held a conference in which everybody presented and shared their research designs, and got feedback both from their fellow academics and from advocates and activists involved in RCV work. It was a delightful, collaborative environment, which I'm sure made all the research better.

My RCV journey Pt II, 2020-today.  waning enthusiasm

When the research findings began coming in many months later, I read all the write-ups carefully. I was hoping that the research would confirm my priors, which I had been arguing publicly: that RCV was a powerful and important reform. Instead, paper after paper came in suggesting RCV was …  fine?  But mostly, it wasn't likely to change much. It had some pros, some cons.

I tried to find the flaws in the papers—why were the effects of RCV so limited? Was something wrong? I posed some questions to many of the researchers, suggesting perhaps some angles they might have missed. I got some good answers back. It was all solid scholarship. You can read all the papers here.

However, one bright spot was that the few papers that examined proportional multiwinner form of RCV, also known as STV (Single-transferable vote) showed that it was powerful in improving diverse representation, thus strengthening my view in the importance of proportional representation through multimember districts.  As my New America colleague Maresa Strano and I concluded in our eventual analysis of the papers, “the most significant conclusions from the research suggest that proportional systems and other structural features—district size and assembly size—that support meaningful multiparty representation are best for minority representation.”

Other research on RCV was also emerging, and coming to similar conclusions. And of particular interest to me, new parties were not organizing and emerging under RCV. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the doom loop was getting worse. Many hoped that after Trump lost the 2020 election, politics might go back to something resembling 'normal.' However, the events of January 6 and its aftermath made it clear that wasn't happening.

And following January 6, interest in proportional representation began to grow. Perhaps we were in a political moment in which folks might be open to bigger changes. At the very least, it was quite clear to me that we were going to need stronger medicine than RCV.

In June 2021, ranked-choice voting came to the New York City primary election. This was a big moment, and it was the last time I wrote a pro-RCV piece. 

I was growing less certain about the benefits of RCV. But I was still a go-to voice, and editors continued to reach out to me. I still saw some benefits for RCV, but my enthusiasm was waning. At the time, Maresa Strano and I were conducting an extensive review of all the studies on RCV, which we published later that year. As we concluded, RCV had some positive qualities, but “many promised benefits of RCV appear to be more modest than many had initially hoped and/or difficult to quantify based on limited usage thus far in the United States.”

I still think RCV makes sense in primary elections, because RCV can help with crowded fields (common in primaries) and RCV is better at finding a consensus winner when an electorate is not deeply divided between two opposing camps (rare in primaries of a single party, where disagreements are smaller). But my days of overpromising on RCV's transformative qualities are over. I see real limits. And I'm much more aware of its downsides, including voter confusion, which is a particular challenge for historically underrepresented communities.

I’ve also been convinced by new analyses that demonstrate that when the electorate is divided, RCV will reflect that division. In a geographically polarized and deeply divided electorate, moderates are unlikely to win more than a few single-winner elections. 

As Peter Buisseret and Carlo Prato note in a recent paper, there are “broad circumstances in which RCV intensifies the candidates’ incentives to target their core supporters and eschew broad campaigning strategies. In particular, this arises in political contexts characterized either by high partisanship, or low baseline participation in elections. Ironically, these are the contexts in which reform advocates argue that RCV is most urgently needed.”

Similarly, Nathan Atkinson, Edward Foley, and Scott C. Ganz conclude in a recent paper that “IRV tends to produce winning candidates who are more divergent ideologically from the state’s median voter, and thus are more extreme winners, than other forms of RCV. Furthermore, this effect is most pronounced in the most polarized states—precisely the set of states for which IRV is being promoted as an antidote to existing divisiveness.”

Without new political parties – not one-off candidates –  to organize a new center, the doom loop will continue. And newer studies suggest that there is no party convergence in Australia, either.

Over the last few years, I’ve also been thinking longer and harder about the role of political parties, and how political parties operate as part of a larger party system. I've read more deeply into complex systems and systems theory, and thought more about the nature of organization in politics. This has led me to think more about how reforms impact the strength and structure of political parties, and to use this as the lens through which I view reforms: Do they help political parties to better do the things that only political parties can and must do for a functioning democracy, such as making elections coherent and meaningful, engaging diverse citizens in politics, building governing coalitions, and elevating and vetting quality candidates? 

Over the past two years, I've become more enthusiastic about fusion voting as a party-centered—as opposed to candidate-centered—path towards breaking the two-party doom loop, and moving us towards proportional representation. Again, I've laid out my thinking in a major report, More Parties, Better Parties, as well as a shorter Washington Post op-ed and elsewhere in this substack, so I won't elaborate further here, other than to justify briefly: I see fusion voting as a way of encouraging new parties to form, and I see new parties as the essential precursor to a proportional multiparty democracy. But fusion voting can only work in partisan, general elections. 

I do not consider myself anti-RCV. I simply see a more limited role for it than I previously envisioned. Again, I would like to see RCV in primaries (to the extent that we continue to have primary elections) and local nonpartisan elections, proportional representation for all partisan elections that allow for multiple winners, which would include most U.S. House elections, and fusion in all inherently single-winner partisan elections, which include elections for governor and senator. 

Among the proposed reforms to partisan single-winner elections, I think fusion is most likely to move us towards proportional representation because it moves us decidedly towards multiparty democracy by encouraging new party formation. Thus, in single-winner elections where it would be technically possible to implement either fusion voting or RCV, I would prioritize fusion. 

I don’t see reform as zero-sum.  America is a very very very big country with more than half a million elected offices at multiple levels of government. Local elected office is different from state elected office, which is different from national elected office. The authority of government is different at different levels, and the issues often are as well.  Primary elections are different from general elections. Some cities and states are small and homogenous, some are large and diverse.  Size is an under-appreciated aspect of politics. Small polities have different dynamics than large polities.  Depending on the circumstances, and depending on the problems, different electoral systems may be more appropriate. 

There is no perfect electoral system. All voting methods have trade-offs. To ask which voting method is best is to ask the wrong question. In certain circumstances, RCV is the best voting method. But because my goal is to break the two-party doom loop at a national level, and my standard for reform is whether it builds more and better parties, I recommend fusion voting and open-list proportional representation

On the value of sometimes being wrong and on acting with (some) uncertainty

Now, let me get philosophical. The whole enterprise of science depends on the possibility of being wrong. Of course, I want to always be right. Our brains are hard-wired for this. But nobody knows everything. New studies are always coming out. The world is constantly changing. Knowledge is expanding faster than anybody can keep track of. 

Yet, life demands actions and decisions. If we took the time to read and evaluate everything, we'd never make a decision. Analysis paralysis can be a real problem. And not deciding is more than not deciding—it is affirming the status quo. Sometimes, we see a problem. How certain should we be before we settle on a course of action? 60 percent? 80 percent? 90 percent? 95 percent? Perhaps it depends on how dangerous the current course of action is.

Here lies a key difference between advocacy and academia. Advocates have a bias towards action, and want to do something, sometimes, anything. Academics have a bias towards near certainty, and want to be confident they are accurately describing the world. The convention in academia is to be 95 percent certain, or at least no less than 90 percent certain. Academics are naturally skeptical, and political scientists as a whole tend to be dubious of political reforms because of their high uncertainty.

I sit on the uncomfortable and often lonely border of advocacy and academia, which makes me more skeptical about most reforms than most reformers, but more enthusiastic about political reform generally than most academics. I believe the status quo is really dangerous. I believe we are stuck in an escalating doom loop of destructive hyper-partisanship. So I have a bias towards doing something to alter the trajectory, even if it means deciding with imperfect information. Then again, we are always deciding with imperfect information. The world is complicated. 

Recommending something about which I am 75 percent confident means there is a 25 percent chance I am wrong. I’m willing to recommend a course of action when I’m 75 percent confident that it’s right. But I also want to continue to seek out more evidence. Depending on what I learn, my confidence may rise or fall. If it falls too much, I feel obligated to correct myself publicly. My certainty in the value of proportional representation, however, has risen the more I’ve read and discussed and debated, though critics raise some important concerns. 

I'm extraordinarily grateful that my career involves thinking through these questions of democracy. I'm also very fortunate that I work at a place, the Political Reform program at New America, where I'm allowed to question and update my views and still keep my job. In many places, there is the organization line and the unemployment line, and if you don't follow the first, you risk winding up on the second. This is not the case at New America, and I'm grateful to my colleagues for creating a culture that balances inquiry and action in appropriate amounts. 

Today, I am more enthusiastic about fusion voting, both on its own and as a pathway to proportional representation. As I've learned more about fusion, I've appreciated its unique applicability for this current political moment, which is actually quite different from the political moment of 2016, when I first encountered RCV. Fusion can provide a political home and voice for disaffected non-MAGA Republicans, who hold the key to our (small-d) democratic future, and who are far more important today than I appreciated in 2016. The world has changed, and it will continue to change. Could I be wrong? I freely acknowledge it is possible.

If fusion voting is used more widely, we will learn more about it (just as we have with RCV). But at this moment, I see fusion as much more likely to have a positive impact on the current trajectory for the reasons I've listed above, as well as elsewhere.  Fusion seems to me more transformative for partisan, general elections, and more likely to move us towards the proportional multiparty democracy that I am 95 percent certain will improve our representative democracy. Again, I still think RCV makes sense for primary elections, where fields are often crowded and candidates sometimes win with a small plurality.

I may be prematurely wrong about RCV having such a limited impact. I acknowledge that reforms may take time to have an impact, and we won't know its effects for many years to come, so we shouldn't make a conclusion prematurely. Again, I can only go on my best guess, based on what I've seen so far. I will continue to read the evidence closely. It’s a big country, with lots of local variation in political cultures and circumstances, and many different types of elections, and different reforms may be more appropriate for different types of elections. The more resources and political will we have, the more broadly we should explore a diversity of approaches in a diversity of places. 

I also acknowledge that I am only one person, with my own biases and blind spots. I am never 100 percent certain that I am right, because I am 99 percent sure there is no such thing as 100 percent certainty. But in a world where we have to make decisions, and where not doing anything is accepting the status quo, all I can do is act on my best judgment, hear all the best arguments, keep watching the world, and welcome the ongoing debate.

We all can only operate in a world of imperfect and changing information. Democracy is a system for people who are not sure they are right, and who are willing to learn and update their views through argument and compromise. Only by stating our assumptions clearly can we test them. Sometimes they may be wrong.