Some Establishment Democrats Want to Ban Ranked-Choice Voting

If the ban is included in the overall rules package guiding the 2028 primaries, it would override current laws in Maine and Washington, D.C, and squash growing interest in the use of RCV among state legislators and the many state parties that run their own primaries, most of which are in deeply red rural states like Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming where party activists are already primed to use RCV.

The proposed ban is driven by older DNC members from states where the Democratic Party has a lock on power—like Massachusetts, Maryland and New York—and where the party establishment has been resistant to opening up the party to new, and younger, leadership that often emerges in RCV elections.

The age gap in support for RCV is breathtaking. The super-majority support among voters under 50 makes me optimistic for the future of RCV as a reform, it in the short-term it confronts a gerontocracy that is used to business as usual.

In 2024, the DNC’s powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee recently passed language mirroring the position of national Republicans who voted to block use of RCV. It would block state parties from using RCV and, where RCV is the law, only award delegates based on first choices. Some Rules and Bylaws Committee members protest that this is not a “ban.” But that argument is disingenuous. It would be analogous to a rule that vote-by-mail ballots could be cast, but only in person votes would count toward awarding delegates.

The surprise attack on RCV was organized by DNC member Frank Leone, a long-time opponent of RCV who badly lost local battles about using RCV locally among Democrats in his previous city of Arlington, Virginia, and in his current home of Washington, D.C. Leone’s tactic was to claim that RCV is incompatible with the party’s long-time proportional representation requirement, wherein candidates for presidents that garner more than 15% of the popular vote are are awarded delegates proportional to their share of the vote. That’s false, yet Rules and Bylaws Committee leaders like Leone and the 80-year-old Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chair Jim Roosevelt, have shamelessly made that argument in Maine news articles about the controversy.

To be sure, the most prominent uses of RCV are to elect a single office by a majority vote. Voters rank candidates in order of preference: first choice, second choice and so on until they have ranked the candidates they care about.. Ballots are counted in the initial round for first choices. If a candidate has more than half the vote, that candidate wins. If not, there is an instant runoff designed to compare the leading candidates head-to-head. Candidates in last place are dropped, and ballots for those defeated candidates are added to the totals of the next ranked choice until two candidates remain. The candidate with the majority wins. This “instant runoff” form of RCV would have led to Ralph Nader’s votes electing Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race and has repeatedly worked well in the dozens of states and cities that have passed RCV in the years since, most recently in Maine. .

Presidential primaries are different even as they provide  the most compelling use case for RCV. Primaries draw crowded fields of candidates that voters get to know and are eager to rank rather than be limited to one. Parties must unite their big tent of voters, and RCV rewards unifying candidates. Addressing a specific problem, the sequential nature of primaries is a problematic fit with early voting—in 2020, for example, more than three million Democratic voters cast a ballot for a candidate who had withdrawn before that vote was counted.

Democratic primaries are not winner-take-all, however. Candidates with at least 15% of the vote win delegates in proportion to their vote share. But without RCV, that threshold can make large numbers of votes irrelevant. States using RCV give backers of candidates below the threshold a second choice. That’s why, as spelled out clearly in the 2020 state plans approved by the RBC and in the Washington, D.C law, RCV would be used not to elect a majority winner, but with a “bottoms up” rule. That is, trailing candidates would be dropped (either sequentially or all those under 15% at once) until the remaining candidates are all above the viability threshold of 15% for earning delegates.

This rule works. In 2020, four Democratic parties using RCV in mostly rural states like Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas and Wyoming experienced ig surges in voter turnout and had more than 98% of their ballots count toward candidates winning delegates because nearly everyone ranking a weaker candidate has their ballot count for their next choice among those winning delegates, Done nationally, this use of RCV would have led to more than 2.5 million votes for withdrawn candidates counting for an active candidate.

Where it’s used, RCV is overwhelmingly popular among Democrats. A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that among registered Democrats in Maine, the state’s RCV law is supported by an 84% to 6% margin. Washington, D.C. voters are also enthusiastic about RCV after its successful rollout in primaries this June, with Democrats backing it 74% to 17%.

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee  rules are rarely overturned, but the full DNC at its August meeting this coming weekend may do just that. Many Democratic state party leaders were not asked for their opinion and are shocked by the committee’s divisive overreach. They’d prefer Democrats to focus on winning elections, not picking internal battles where a party gerontocracy overrides state parties being able to use RCV to attract more participation by younger voters, make more votes count, and reward a more unifying nominee. We’ll soon find out if the DNC agrees.

Rob RichieMore by this author →

Rob Richie is a co-founder of FairVote and the president of Expand Democracy, a nonprofit designed to accelerate progress for promising pro-democracy ideas.