Dakota Beacon

Want to hear about the next cultural fiasco in-the-making? Read on.

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Activists have advocated for adoption of ranked choice voting (RCV), a process that allows voters to rank all candidates in order of preference with votes reallocated on subsequent tabulations until one candidate receives a majority. What could possibly go wrong?

Here is how it works. The names of all candidates for a specific office are listed on the ballot. A voter is asked to rank every candidate in the race, from his number one choice to his last choice. For example, in a race with five candidates, a voter is asked to rank the candidates from one through five, with the candidate ranked as number one being the voter’s first choice and the candidate ranked as number five being the voter’s last choice.

Here is the catch. If no candidate wins a majority in the tabulation of the ballots, then the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and the voters who selected that candidate as their number one choice automatically have their votes changed to their second choice, and another round of vote tabulation -- not voting -- occurs.

If no candidate wins a majority in the second round of tabulation, the lowest scoring candidate is again eliminated and the voters who selected that candidate as their top choice (or as their second choice if that voter’s top choice was eliminated after the first round) have their ballots redistributed to their next choice, and a third round of vote tabulation occurs.

Such candidate elimination, redistribution, and retabulating of votes continues until one of the remaining candidates achieves a majority of the votes. Unfortunately, that candidate may ultimately have been the second, third, fourth, or last choice of many voters -- meaning that a candidate could win who was not the first choice of a majority of voters.

RCV did not simply spring from a grassroots groundswell or from a bunch of disgruntled independents. Rather, RCV is very much driven by left-wing, Democrat-aligned donors and activist groups. This was the observation made by Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor from 2011 to 2019 known for his successful legislative proposal to ban collective bargaining by Wisconsin state employees.

Attaching the “leftist” moniker to RCV becomes an appropriate label. Look where the RCV came from and see who embraces it now. Guilt by association? Not so much. Guilt by adoption and experience is more like it.

Tad Milbourn, a former Intuit project manager and Green Bay native, left Silicon Valley in 2018 for his home state of Wisconsin. He set a goal of starting a tech company that would quietly “lay the groundwork for a better democracy.”

In August 2020, he began working full time on RankedVote, a one-man company that hosts online polls and elections. (See https://www.rankedvote.co and note the correct spelling of the domain name as “co”.) (See also https://fairvote.org/.) Although RCV already existed, his company plan was to offer exclusively a refined version of RCV. With all the idealism of potheads, his backers and proponents promised to reduce polarization along with negative campaigning, i.e., dysfunctional democracy. Even voting for third party candidates Milbourn thought seemed futile. “You need to change the system if you’re going to expect a different result.” That should be a HUGH clue.

Milbourn understood that each voter should have only one vote. But by ranking each candidate, they would provide the information needed for “election administrators” to essentially “simulate a series of instant runoffs.”

In 2016 only 10 cities used RCV. By the November 2023 elections 21 cities used RCV across seven states (CO, DE, MA, ME, MN, NM, and UT). Ten of the cities (all in Utah) will use RCV in elections on November 21. Salt Lake City will elect its mayor with RCV on November 21. The largest cities in Maine and Minnesota already use RCV. Boulder, CO successfully used RCV for the first time, in the city’s first direct mayoral election.

Leftists use feel-good arguments including reduced cost and “simplicity” to promote replacing our time-honored and proven election process. RCV has been tried repeatedly since the 1800s, but its adoption is typically followed by its swift repeal. Case in point: Alaska initiated RCV in all state and federal elections last year. However, a serious repeal effort is now underway, and polling indicates repeal is likely.

Since RCV makes the voting process more complicated, voters will make mistakes resulting in spoiled ballots being rejected. States and municipalities who employed RCV exhibit a record of confusion resulting in spoiled ballots. Nearly one in three voters fail to rank multiple candidates in RCV elections resulting in that voter’s ballot being thrown out.

In the 2021 New York mayor’s race, it took eight rounds of vote counting of the 10 candidates during two weeks’ time before a final winner was announced. By the eighth round, the ballots of more 140,000 voters had been thrown out and therefore effectively disenfranchised.

At this point the camel’s head and neck, not just his nose, are in the tent and advancing.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).