RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.
(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn’t update the title text)
As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.
- Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
- West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
- Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
- North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
- Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.
Six states banned RCV in 2024.
Why YSK: If you’re a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don’t allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.
Edit: fixed formatting
Edit 2: Added in the map so you don’t have to click the link:
See the pattern? 🤔
You also have to account in human stupidity. If you make the ballot too complex, dumbasses are gonna mess it up and the ballots will be invalidated.
Ok, I’m sold, let’s do this
The ballot is the same for all ranked voting methods. The method of determining winner from those ballots varies, and some are clearly worse.
For instance, if a candidate would beat all others 1-on-1 (Condorcet winner), then should a decent method always select that candidate as winner? RCV doesn’t do that.
Example
Who wins according to instant run-off? C. Who wins against every opponent 1-on-1? B.
Other methods also fail.
This nice table compares voting methods by a wide range of properties. I don’t think it hurts to make a more informed decision before backing a method that will be difficult to change. The US got stuck with FPTP through inadequate research, and it’d be great not to repeat that mistake.
While rated voting methods fail the Condorcet winner criterion, by rating instead of ranking candidates they satisfy another set of criteria also worth considering.
Among ranked voting methods, ranked pairs seems most compelling to me. Among rated voting methods, approval seems pretty good (and extremely simple).
I retract this portion of the comment and put in this spoiler
I think that’d fail miserably in the real world.
Think about the average voter. They see this ballot:
A vs B?
A vs C?
A vs D?
B vs C?
B vs D?
C vs D?
Yea I think they’re gonna freak out upon seeing this ballot. Right now, the most important goal should be to get rid of the spoiler effect and FPTP, rather than finding the best system.
I can see a bit of strategic voting happening.
Let me demonstrate:
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we have 3 candidates, and no term limits:
Trump, Biden, Sanders
Biden and Sander voters dispise trump, their preference in RCV is (example):
Biden>Sanders>Trump: 30%
Sander>Biden>Trump: 25%
Trump>Sanders>Biden: 23%
Trump>Biden>Sanders: 22%
Okay, so lets say they all approve their top 2:
Biden: 77%
Sanders: 78%
Trump: 45%
Okay we have president Sanders! Congrats, right?
Well, now the trumpers who approved sanders are like: “Hey wait a minute, we made our daddy lose because we approved Sanders”
All the trumpers now have a meeting and decided that next election, they don’t approve Sanders or Biden as a strategic vote.
So now, Election 2 Results:
Biden: 55%
Sanders: 55%
Trump: 45%
Oh great, it’s a tie. The law says that the election have to be re-done to solve the tie:
Now this next election, all people who preferred Sanders first go to a Sanders supporter meeting and started saying: “Lets disapprove Biden so Bernie can win!”
Simultaneously, Biden voters will be like: “Lets disapprove Sanders so Biden can win!”
Next election results:
Trump: 45%
Biden: 30%
Sanders 25%
Congrats, we have a glorified FPTP and spoiler effect yet again!
Now, other election systems could also have strategic voting, but its less likely with, for example, RCV, since you can rank candidates.
I think you missed the first sentence I wrote:
Maybe explaining what you think that means would clear up confusion?
Yes, approval voting is indeed susceptible to strategies including burial, which leads to a “chicken dilemma”.
Ah nvm, I thought the ballot was gonna lok like this:
A vs B?
A vs C?
A vs D?
B vs C?
B vs D?
C vs D?
I misunderstood, I get it now, its all tabulated in the background, same ballot as Ranked-Choice voting.
But my point about the approval voting still stands.
RCV isn’t monotonic, meaning that in the right circumstances you can harm your chosen candidate’s chances by ranking him higher. Doesn’t matter how rare it is; what a ridiculous quality for a voting system to have.
The point of RCV isn’t to ensure your chosen candidate wins; it’s to ensure that whoever does win has at least some amount of approval from the majority of voters.
It does still have flaws, but it’s still far superior to the current system the US uses.
Really, anything other than FPTP is fine. RCV only has the same outcome as FPTP, where the least liked candidate can win, in ~10% of outcomes which is fairly uncommon. Really we should be okay with promoting most of the alternatives since they can be modified down the line as well. I personally promote Ranked Robin, STAR, and Score more but RCV is always worth supporting if it’s on your local ballot vs FPTP. Most people are more familiar and accepting of RCV if they have heard of some of these alternatives.
I think most people would agree that it does matter how rare it is.
Even if imperfect, ranked choice voting would give voters considerably more voice than they have now. That could be used to, for example, vote in another method in the future.
I agree it’s a flaw, but the answer isn’t to move to an even worse and more gameable system, it’s to move to proportional systems like MMP.
Cardinal voting systems are terrible because strategic voting is as trivial as it is in FPTP. In IRV situations where strategic voting would be possible exist, but they’re rare and hard to predict. In cardinal systems it’s always best to give the maximum score or the minimum score, and never anything in between.
And when that happens it just defaults to approval, which is still non-monotonic and better than IRV, but it’s been proven anyway that that doesn’t happen and most people are honest (or would learn to be honest after few iterations). IRV is also not devoid of strategy, as it can be better to rank your true favourite lower
I think you missed the part where I said that it can happen, but that it’s rare and hard to predict.
Approval Voting is bad because of the simple fact that it doesn’t let you express any preference. There’s no ability to say “I’ll take this guy if I really have to, to avoid the worst outcome, but if possible I would much prefer this other guy”. In single-winner systems, having some mechanism to express that one candidate is better than another is absolutely crucial.
Yea, sorry, my wording wasn’t the clearest. I meant to say that it is actually not that rare, and hoped that the linked source would help support that claim. From the same website:
We can [assume that] “all votes [are] equally likely except that the probabilities that A,B,C will be middle-ranked of the three in that vote are 30%, 30%, and 40% respectively” where C is the 3rd-party candidate. Then in IRV as #voters→∞, C’s probability of winning is probably exponentially tiny so that Joe Voter is justified in assuming C only a very tiny […] chance of winning. Indeed C only has a tiny chance of merely surviving the first round.
However, Joe reasons, if Joe and friends by honestly-ranking C top do manage to make C survive the first round, then that will almost certainly happen only at the cost of eliminating Joe’s second-favorite candidate A. If the A votes then transfer equally to C and B (which in “1-dimensional politics” with C A B arranged along a “line” in that order, seems likely) then C will almost certainly still lose, and will have deprived A of victory in the process.
The idea then would be that the behavior of mid-ranking the 3rd party candidate would be self-reinforcing in IRV: an assumption of a slight bias that way like we just made (40% versus 30% […]), then leads to it being strategically wise for Joe Voter to do it, leading to a larger bias that way, etc. – positive feedback, self-reinforcing 2-party domination.
I agree and that’s why I support Score Voting over it! The mechanism to express that one candidate is better than another one is to just give them honest scores! And there’s studies proving that’s the reality is, the vast majority of people are at least somewhat honest when filling out a Score ballot
Cardinal systems devolve into approval, and approval doesn’t allow expressing preference. And being unable to express preference lends itself to some of the worst strategic voting and reintroduces the spoiler effect in the place it’s most important to avoid the spoiler effect: serious 3-(or more-)way races. If I’m an A voter, B is centrist, and C is worst, then under approval it’s fine for me to approve of A and B if I know A can’t win. But the moment A is a serious contender, choosing to approve of B decreases the chance A might win. But not approving of B increases the chance C might win. I’m stuck with having to make a terrible decision.
Ordinal systems don’t do this. Some ordinal systems might be better than IRV and avoid the biggest criticisms of that system, but ordinal systems beat cardinal systems nearly every time.
But the main thing about all of this is that every single-winner system is always worse than proportional multi-winner systems. Moving to any system other than FPTP should be the first priority, but if you’re going to spend time knocking down suggestions to improve to the most well-proven alternative, you might as well go all the way and advocate MMP or direct proportional, and on shoring up some of the weaknesses of that system (such as problems with party lists letting parties choose who gets in even if people don’t like the candidate of the party they like, or how minimum thresholds can lead to some people’s votes being effectively wasted).