Ranked-choice voting failed a lot in 2024, here is one reason why
By Jackson Wetherill (Class of 2025.5)
In 2024 Alaskans narrowly upheld their ranked-choice voting (RCV) system by just 743 votes. The voting reform, already in use in Maine and Alaska, allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. Over the last five years, RCV has gained significant attention nationwide with nearly a fifth of all states voting on the issue through ballot initiative.
Voters in Alaska and four other states along with Washington, D.C. considered measures related to ranked-choice voting in the 2024 election. However, proposals to implement ranked-choice voting failed in four of these five states. Interestingly, RCV was rejected in both solid Republican and solid Democratic states.
The issue is increasingly becoming a partisan issue. While in 2019 House Democrats introduced a bill that would require states to adopt the measure, the Republican National Committee stated their opposition to the voting reform in 2023. Moreover, there is an increasing number of Democrats who publicly support the reform, while there are just a few Republicans who support it. Based on where RCV has been implemented and how it has been endorsed by many party elites, RCV is becoming, if not already, a part of the Democratic Party’s policy agenda.
With RCV becoming more aligned with the mainstream Democratic party, I wanted to compare its support to that of Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris’s performance. I anticipated that support for RCV and Harris would be relatively similar. Using election results published by the New York Times and the Washington Post, I found that ranked-choice voting surprisingly underperformed Harris’s margin by an average of about 10 points across these states.
The first graph plots the margin of the Harris vote on the x-axis compared to the margin of the RCV vote in the given states on the y-axis. It seems that Harris’ vote and the RCV vote are positively correlated; however, where Harris got 50% of the vote, RCV on average got around 40% of the vote. This indicates that some voters who supported Harris did not vote to implement a ranked choice voting system.
To understand why, I analyze data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study to see which characteristics made partisans more or less likely to support the measure.
Specifically, I look into how prior knowledge of the policy affected how partisans viewed the issue. Since ranked-choice voting is a relatively new voting reform, there is likely a partisan cue that occurs when citizens learn about the reform. When Democrats learn about the issue, they likely learn RCV is democracy enhancing, which signals they should support the measure. On the contrary, when Republicans hear about the issue, they likely learn the reform is more difficult for voters to understand and that it takes longer for election results to be tallied, which encourages some disdain for RCV.
I compare two subgroups of each party: partisans who had prior knowledge of ranked-choice voting, and partisans who did not. These respondents were asked “Have you heard of rank choice voting?” On the left hand side of the graph we see that Democrats and Republicans who answered no to this question support the measure at similar rates of support for RCV: roughly 1 in 3. Importantly, just under a third of my Democratic sample (n=337) did not have prior knowledge of RCV. However, among partisans who had prior knowledge, a stark contrast appears: Democrats are nearly three times as likely to support the measure as their Republican counterparts.
Indeed, Democrats are broadly supportive of RCV, but only when they know about it. Based on the model, the effect of learning about RCV for Democrats causes a whopping 40 point jump. The support among Democrats who had prior knowledge on the issue is quite high — on par with the favorable rating of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi this past summer at around 72%.
This finding prompted me to then look into what would’ve happened if all voters were educated on the issue in the 2024 election. Was the downfall of RCV in Colorado and Oregon because of the Democratic cohort that was unaware of the measure?
Using the Harris and Trump vote as proxies for partisanship, I multiply my predicted probabilities of Democrats and Republicans supporting the measure, roughly 3 in 4 for the former, 1 in 4 for the latter, by the share of vote for the respective Presidential nominees to simulate how the RCV ballot initiatives would have fared among an electorate of voters who had prior knowledge. The simulated election results are shown in the graph below.
The election results would have changed in three states: the reform would have passed in Oregon and Colorado, while interestingly, the reform would have failed to pass in Alaska. Additionally, the margins of all the states narrowed, with Nevada coming within a point of passing the measure.
The results here point in a direction of answering my initial question: potentially, RCV failed so frequently because of a cohort of Democrats that were ineffectively educated on the issue. If this is the case, then why did these campaigns fail to reach these critical voters in states like Colorado and Nevada? For one, Colorado had a ballot initiative on abortion this year, which likely attracted a greater amount of advertising and attention. Likewise, Nevada, a critical swing state, was inundated with federal ads for both competitive Presidential and Senate races. Both of these factors could have diverted critical local funding and attention away from the RCV campaigns as well.
The research here has demonstrated that when Democrats are educated on ranked choice voting, they support it broadly. This suggests that Democrats didn’t oppose the measure because they didn’t like it, they just didn’t have the proper partisan cueing to learn about the reform. In response to this finding, ranked-choice voting campaigns ought to prioritize outreach and education on the issue if they hope to succeed in future ballot initiatives in blue leaning states.
