Ranked Choice Voting: A Means of Overturning or Entrenching Privilege?

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Organizations and Parties & Elections and Voting Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Elections and Political Behaviour

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, ranked choice voting (RCV) has seen a resurgence in the United States. Voters from the Bay Area to the Twin Cities have been using RCV to elect members of their local governments for nearly a decade or more. The greatest expansion of the system’s use came in 2018, with Maine’s implementation of RCV for federal offices. Many of these jurisdictions have even gone so far as to release their cast vote records and ballot image data, or anonymized data indicating voters’ precincts and how they marked their ballots. But as RCV is becoming increasingly widely used, researchers and voting rights activists are questioning the way voters engage with RCV as well as the system’s implications for political power. Using exit polls and ballot image data, this paper will respond to both issues by examining voters’ use of RCV and the outcomes of these races.

First, the study will analyze the characteristics of voters who choose to rank their preferred candidates, before turning to trends in the number of candidates ranked, and potential factors which influence the use of rankings. These findings will then be placed in context to explore RCV’s impact upon privilege via inclusive representation. Preliminary data indicate that a significant proportion of diverse voters not only use more than one ranking to express their candidate preferences, but that they do so successfully, without the kinds of ballot errors that would render their vote invalid.

Author

• Erica Frazier, Fairvote