Do Americans Support the Transfer Feature of Preferential Voting?

• In Event: Reactions to Ranked-Choice Voting

Abstract

A growing number of state and local jurisdictions in the United States have recently adopted preferential voting rules, known in America as ranked choice voting (RCV). The ability to have one’s vote transfer to a second or third choice candidate is a major selling point of RCV. However, there is little direct evidence indicating whether American voters really like this feature. When given an explanation of the vote transfer properties of RCV, do American voters evaluate RCV more positively and rank more candidates, even in a voting task with many candidates? Our study answers these questions by conducting a survey experiment to test how voters evaluate and use ranked choice voting (RCV). Our survey is a module on the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). The CMPS is a very large national sample (N=20,000) and includes large subsamples of Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans (N=4,000 for each group). This allows us to examine whether evaluations of voting rules, and voting behavior on each method, vary across racial and ethnic subgroups, a key issue for RCV and pluralism.

Authors

• Joseph Anthony, Oklahoma State University

• David C. Kimball, University of Missouri, St. Louis

• Jack Santucci, Drexel University

• Jamil Shatema Scott, Georgetown University