Supporters of ranked choice voting celebrated 2024 as the year in which more voters than ever before would weigh in on fundamentally changing the way they would elect public officials.
Then cold hard reality crashed into their plans.
Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon rejected measures that would have required ranked choice voting in state and federal elections. The margins of defeat for those initiatives ranged from a narrow 6 percentage points in Nevada and 8 points in Colorado to a much wider 40-point loss in Idaho.
A separate initiative to repeal an existing ranked choice voting system in Alaska, where thousands of votes are left to count, is leading by about 4,000 votes, a margin of 51%-49%.
In Missouri, voters approved Amendment 7, which will ban state and local governments from adopting ranked choice voting. That amendment also included a provision to bar noncitizens from voting, though no jurisdiction in Missouri currently allows noncitizens to vote.
The results were not entirely negative for ranked choice voting supporters: Voters in Washington, D.C., approved creating ranked choice voting by a wide 73%-27%, while voters in Oak Park, Ill., and Peoria, Ill., both approved ranked choice measures — though the measure in Peoria was an advisory question with no legal authority.
“Changing the status quo is never easy. Entrenched interests — including several state parties and an increasingly well-organized national opposition — pushed back hard on this year’s statewide ballot measures,” said Meredith Sumpter, president and CEO of FairVote, which backs ranked choice voting. “But make no mistake: The future remains bright for ranked choice voting.”
The apparent repeal of ranked choice voting in Alaska means only one state will use the system going forward. Maine voters adopted ranked choice voting ahead of the 2018 elections.
Opponents of ranked choice voting — in which voters can select as many candidates as they want, with votes reallocated as low-performing candidates are eliminated — often claim the system is too confusing for voters to figure out.
Those claims may have gotten a boost in Portland, Ore., where voters faced more than a dozen choices for mayor and more than 30 candidates running for seats on the city council. A review by The Oregonian found about 1 in 5 Portland voters did not bother to vote for any city council candidates — a figure that was much higher in the city’s eastern neighborhoods, the most diverse and economically challenged part of the city.
“Voters opened up their ballots to find a daunting grid of bubbles,” the Oregonian’s editorial board wrote. “For people who lack the time to research candidates or aren’t interested in local politics, the dizzying array of potential choices can be a reason to skip choosing altogether.”
Political parties — especially in places where one side tends to dominate elections — came out against ranked choice voting initiatives on this year’s ballot. In D.C., yard signs opposing the measure that popped up in the final weeks of the election were paid for by the District’s Democratic Party.
On the other side, dark money groups such as Article IV, based in Arlington, Va., and Unite America, based in Denver, Colo., spent millions to bolster ranked choice voting campaigns. Those groups combined to spend about $20 million on the losing effort in Nevada, and about $3 million on Idaho’s losing campaign, according to campaign finance reports.