The Costs of Complexity: How RCV Affects Voter Turnout in Mayoral Elections

• In Event: Ranked-Choice Voting in a Difficult Voting-Rights Climate

Abstract

How does increased complexity of the vote task affect voter turnout in low-information mayoral elections? Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) is an election system that has been adopted in several U.S. cities. I develop a theory about how the complexity of RCV can be expected to impose greater costs on voters, leading to lower turnout. I assess that argument using a difference-in-differences design to analyze voter turnout in mayoral elections in over 200 cities, dating from 1993 to 2020. To account for potential estimation bias related to staggered adoption of RCV across multiple time periods, I present estimates of the average RCV treatment effect on city-level turnout from several different estimators, including two-way fixed effects, two-stage difference-in-differences, and a robust and efficient imputation estimator (Borusyak, Jaravel, and Spiess 2021, Callaway and Sant’anna, 2020, Gardner 2021). The results indicate that RCV has a significant negative effect on voter turnout and that the effect varies across city election timing cycle. The negative RCV effect on voter turnout suggests that additional complexity associated with voting under RCV comes with certain costs which may have implications for equality of participation in local elections.

Author

• Jason A. McDaniel, San Francisco State University