Introduction (Lee Drutman and Maresa Strano)

Introduction

By Lee Drutman and Maresa Strano

Since San Francisco adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV) for municipal elections in 2002, the alternative voting system has captured the imagination of political reformers across the United States. As of November 2021, 43 jurisdictions used some form of RCV in their most recent election.¹ This includes over 20 cities in Utah, which are using various forms of RCV as part of a temporary pilot program created by the state legislature. Even more places, including the state of Alaska, plan to use RCV in their next election. In addition, in the 2020 elections, RCV was used in five states’ presidential primaries and caucuses, and the Republican Party of Virginia embraced RCV for their 2021 nominating convention.

As ranked-choice voting continues to spread across America, activists, voters, election officials, and state legislators want to know more about the effects of switching from plurality voting to RCV and adopting other election reforms. How would it change how people are represented, who runs for office, how they run for office, who turns out to vote, and who wins? How might governance and policymaking change as a result? They also want to know what the public thinks about ranked-choice voting, or might think about it once they learn more.

New America’s Political Reform has long recognized the need for more—and more publicly accessible—research into the ways that RCV and other electoral reforms impact political participation, power, processes, partisanship, and policy outcomes. In 2019, we formed the Electoral Reform Research Group (ERRG) with partners at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; the Scholars Strategy Network; and the R Street Institute, and set out to organize a new body of work from political scientists around the country and overseas. Since 2020, the ERRG organizing committee has included Stanford’s CDDRL, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Unite America Institute.²

When we began this project, the research available on RCV was limited, particularly scholarly research. While much of it suggested positive effects, including more civility, more voter satisfaction, and more diverse candidates, other research suggested that it may complicate voting for lower-income and minority voters. And some research found it does not change much either way. Meanwhile, dramatic claims about RCV were spreading and growing louder. On the one hand, advocates were touting the method’s ability to deliver transformative benefits that could save our democracy; on the other, opponents were insisting that the added cognitive burden of a ranked system would suppress voting and lead to sky-high rates of ballot rejection, especially among those who are already underrepresented or prone to voting error.

To better inform the public and lawmakers about ranked-choice voting, we sought to expand on and fill gaps in this emerging literature. Our call for proposals asked for projects examining RCV’s benefits, as well as the costs and challenges. All electoral systems have trade-offs, after all, and we should know what they are.

With the help of our advisory board, we selected 14 proposals from a blend of veteran and emerging political scientists to develop into full-fledged research. Topics covered include minority representation, voter satisfaction, information and complexity, moderation and ideological representation, and polarization. We refined the proposals at a research development workshop that brought together all 14 research teams, as well as members of the organizing and advisory committees—many of them RCV and political reform practitioners—for a full day of presentations, discussion, and community-building. We then reconvened in June 2021 to share and discuss the findings of what turned out to be a 15-paper collection. Together, we identified remaining gaps and tensions, and set a course for future research that takes advantage of new data and developments in the electoral reform movement at large.

Consistent with previous RCV research, most of the studies in this series found RCV to be either a comparable or modestly better alternative to our standard "first-past-the-post" or plurality method (in which the candidate who gets most votes, but not necessarily the majority, wins). For example, results indicate that switching from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to single-member RCV produces small improvements in terms of political expression,³ voter error,⁴ and attitudes about system legitimacy;⁵ and mostly null effects in terms of minority representation,⁶ racial polarization,⁷ candidate emergence,⁸ and policy responsiveness.⁹ In the case of extremism, two studies that considered whether RCV supports moderate (or extreme) candidates were split between positive¹⁰ and neutral effects¹¹ compared to traditional methods.

Some of the studies highlighted circumstances under which RCV might perform worse than FPTP and even majoritarian runoffs. However, most of them tell a similar story about a (reasonably) solvable problem: status quo bias.

American voters tend to prefer more familiar rules like plurality and even two-stage runoffs, absent a convincing reason for change. In particular, older voters and Republicans show less satisfaction with RCV.¹²

Dissatisfaction is also sometimes associated with less understanding of the way RCV operates, compared to more familiar voting systems.¹³ The status quo bias and accompanying reported difficulties in understanding tend to be impervious to explanations of how RCV works, and even common arguments for and against RCV. These include claims that RCV elects majority winners and helps elect women and people of color, and, on the negative side, that RCV is too confusing.¹⁴

Yet most of the studies that identified these problems also suggested that experience with RCV increases voters' satisfaction with and understanding of the system. Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi,¹⁵ and Joseph Cerrone and Cynthia McClintock¹⁶ found that people who start off uneasy about RCV can “learn to like” the system through repeated exposure. Melody Crowder-Meyer, Shana Kushner Gadarian, and Jessica Trounstine found that voters’ initial negative feelings about and difficulty understanding RCV largely went away after participating in a second series of ranked-choice contests.¹⁷ Cheryl Boudreau, Jonathan Colner, and Scott MacKenzie observed that providing voter guides significantly narrowed gaps in ranking utilization between voters of different levels of political knowledge, and helped voters to better align their candidate rankings with their policy views.¹⁸

Despite some variation in results among the studies that focused on how voters evaluate and use RCV, they all validate the conventional wisdom that sustained voter education—before, during, and even after initial implementation—is the sine qua non of any effective and equitable reform process. They also suggest that voter education should prioritize outreach to older voters, as well as others who may feel stronger loyalty to the status quo, like Republicans outside of major metro areas or communities of color residing in minority-majority districts.

The takeaways on messaging are also important. In national surveys, explanations of the mechanics of RCV do not appear to influence how voters evaluate the system.¹⁹ Joseph Anthony and David Kimball recommend messengers emphasize “the shortcomings of current voting rules as well as the mechanics and rationale for new rules.”²⁰ While more research is needed to understand the efficacy of such messaging on voter ratings of RCV, on the question of how RCV messaging affects attitudes toward candidate entry, Jack Santucci and Jamil Scott found that communicating how RCV contrasts with FPTP led to greater interest in running for office among Black respondents (though not other racial groups).²¹ In addition, survey data suggests the argument that RCV is too confusing might not be as compelling as RCV critics think. Nonetheless, messengers should be mindful of how that argument could be weaponized against voters, and especially Black voters.²²

On a methodological note, the studies in this series that examine how Americans evaluate RCV underscore a clear divergence in the small but growing body of research on this topic. When Americans who don’t know RCV are exposed to it in an experimental setting and asked to rate the system, the majority tend to prefer the status quo plurality method—at least at first. Conversely, research conducted outside this series indicates that, in places where RCV has already been implemented, voters tend to prefer RCV to traditional voting systems.²³ It is important to understand that for most voters, RCV is still something different and strange, and a single survey experiment can only capture this initial reaction. For now, then, we should maintain a healthy skepticism of experiments that measure respondents’ preferences for RCV versus other voting systems. Still, these surveys offer important insights into how different types of voters might initially respond to ranking and how advocates can both better respond to initial hesitation and design educational resources. Anyone embarking on a new campaign to implement RCV or any new voting method needs to understand that at this point, most voters—not only the most change-resistant groups highlighted—are likely unaware and skeptical, and will need convincing that there is a better way to vote. Such research can also serve as benchmarks for future studies. If national efforts to improve the popularity of RCV are successful, we should observe changes in receptivity to ranked-choice voting in these kinds of surveys and experiments.

The chief takeaways from the 15 papers in this collection are: 1) RCV is learnable; 2) its effects on participation and representation are mainly small but tend to be positive compared to FPTP; and 3) replacing FPTP with RCV without addressing the other structural drivers of America’s hyperpolarized and inequitable two-party system, including single-member districts, is unlikely to bring about the large-scale change we need to repair our national political dysfunction. Put another way, adopting RCV will not hurt as much as you might fear, but it may not help as much as you might hope.

RCV proponents may be disappointed by this pattern of mostly “null to small” effects. And certainly, results like these are unlikely to spur an indifferent citizen to start volunteering for an RCV-enactment campaign, or even reinvigorate current activists. Nevertheless, when you consider how fear of change—and the unintended consequences that often accompany change—can strangle political reform movements, the fact that these projects did not surface any significant new problems with RCV is encouraging.

The “lack of bad news” headline applies especially to the representation of people of color. Of all the projects that explored RCV’s impacts on people of color, none found that replacing FPTP with RCV disadvantages minority voters or candidates.

For instance, Crowder-Meyer et al. found that respondents voting in simulated nonpartisan local elections penalized candidates of color at similar rates under plurality and RCV rules, and these rates were similarly diminished when partisan labels were introduced. The authors concluded, “While more complex electoral environments have been shown to negatively affect voter support for candidates of color, this outcome seems not to be triggered by the rules governing RCV elections.”²⁴

Meanwhile, communicating how RCV promotes diversity in political representation does not hurt support for RCV or lower interest in running for office generally, although it may not help much either. One survey found that pro-diversity messaging around RCV increased support for RCV among most survey respondents, the exception being, unsurprisingly, white Republicans.²⁵ A separate survey that tested (among other things) whether diversity messaging affects attitudes about running for office reported mostly null results; however, the idea that women and people of color are more electable under RCV did lower Latino respondents’ interest in running, suggesting there is a need for more nuanced messaging within communities of color about whom RCV benefits.²⁶

Again, a leading claim by RCV opponents is that the added complexity of ranked and other alternative ballots exacerbates existing racial disparities in voting error. Through large-scale online experiments conducted at the height of the 2020 U.S. presidential primary season, Jason Maloy examined how different ballot types affect the likelihood that some voters will cast more void votes (votes that don’t count toward the final result) than others.²⁷ He concluded that alternative ballot types actually reduced inequalities in void votes between BIPOC and white voters.²⁸

Our findings suggest that although RCV alone likely cannot deliver the representational diversity that many advocates promise, better and more proportional representation may be achievable by combining RCV for single offices with proportional RCV for multi-member bodies, also known as the single transferable vote. Indeed, the most significant conclusions from the research suggest that proportional systems and other structural features—district size and assembly size—that support meaningful multiparty representation are best for minority representation.²⁹ (Of course, to get to a place where proportional, multiparty democracy is feasible, we first need to replace single-member districts, which are currently used for the U.S. House of Representatives and most state legislative chambers, with multi-member districts.)

To review, there are two main forms of RCV: single-winner and multi-winner. With single-winner RCV—the type used most often in the United States—voters rank candidates in order of preference. If one candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes, that candidate is the winner. Otherwise, the race goes to an “instant runoff”: the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes in the first round is eliminated and voters who ranked that candidate first have their ballots transferred to their second-choice candidate. The process repeats until one candidate wins a majority.

Multi-winner RCV, also known as single transferable vote (STV), is a form of proportional representation used for electing bodies like city councils, legislatures, and school boards. Under STV, candidates are again ranked in order of preference, and those who receive a predetermined share of votes (also known as the “quota” or “threshold”) win seats. Any candidates that meet the quota in the first round of voting are elected and surplus votes (votes beyond the quota they needed to win) are reallocated to voters’ next choice. If more candidates than seats remain after the first round, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated and voters who ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to their next choice. This process continues until all seats are filled.³⁰

Single- and multi-winner RCV (referred to from this point on as RCV and STV, respectively) are virtually identical in terms of basic ballot design. Where they differ technically is in their win thresholds, or minimum number of votes required to win a seat. While the threshold in a standard RCV election is always a simple majority (50 percent plus one), the threshold in an STV election changes based on the number of seats that need to be filled. The standard formula for calculating the threshold is simple: divide 100 percent by the number of seats, plus one. For instance, if there are three seats up for election on a city council and 100 votes cast, the threshold a candidate must meet to win a council seat is 25 percent plus one, or 26 votes; for a four-seat election, the threshold becomes 20 percent plus one, or 21 votes, and so on.

Technical similarities notwithstanding, STV and RCV produce measurably different effects. The literature on STV, including some of the studies reported here, credits STV with benefits not necessarily offered by single-winner RCV. Specifically, STV appears to confer most of the advantages of proportional representation systems, including more women and BIPOC candidates and winners; higher public trust in elections; broader ideological and partisan representation; and, finally, the near-absence of partisan gerrymandering.

Multi-winner RCV, or STV, appears to be the gold standard for minority representation, consistently outperforming district plurality systems, as discussed in the report by Gerdus Benadè, Ruth Buck, Moon Duchin, Dara Gold, and Thomas Weighill from the MGGG Redistricting Lab at Tufts University.³¹ The authors underline STV’s capacity to secure stable proportional representation for people of color in comparison to single-member district plurality systems. From their research brief: “SMD systems sometimes shut out a substantial minority group entirely, no matter how the lines are drawn; in other instances, they can produce representation at rates significantly greater than what is proportional for groups that are large enough and whose residential geography is concentrated just right. But advocates face tricky decisions in district-drawing with respect to turnout and residential shifts if they want to produce plans that will hold up over time. These concerns are simply not present in STV, because proportionality is a structural property.”³²

But the voting method is not the only structural property that affects political equality. Michael Latner, Matthew Shugart, and Jack Santucci depart, for the moment, from a focus on voting rules to consider the impact of assembly size and district magnitude on BIPOC representation.³³ They collected data from cities across the globe to find out how well those features explain representation in terms of population proportionality as well as the number of parties. The paper’s findings suggest that America’s reliance on single-seat districts and plurality election rules limits the number of parties that compete effectively for minority voters. “As a point of comparison, some of the most diverse Australian cities that use multi-seat ranked-choice voting systems (single transferable vote) may not achieve perfect proportional representation, but they nevertheless elect candidates of color from multiple parties.”³⁴

This series also presents some support for the theory that STV (and to a lesser but relevant extent RCV) can help “break the two-party doom loop” that is driving our democracy to the brink—and driving us all crazy.³⁵ America’s political duopoly has thrived under the single-member district plurality regime, infecting us with a dangerous us-vs-them mentality where any win for the other side is felt not just as a loss for your side but as an existential threat to the country’s future. One of the most pernicious effects of the doom loop has been the breakdown of “mutual toleration”—the norm of accepting election results as legitimate even when you lose.³⁶ In exploring how electoral systems affect this norm, Yphtach Lelkes, Sean Fischer, and Amber Hye-Yon Lee found that RCV and (non-STV) proportional systems were associated with a smaller winner-loser gap in satisfaction and perceived fairness of elections compared to plurality.³⁷ They also found that the gap decreased as the number of parties increased (except when moving from three to four parties), and was lowest at five parties.

Lelkes and his colleagues furthermore tested levels of interparty animosity, or affective polarization—the tendency to dislike and distrust members of the other party—under different election systems and number of parties. Affective polarization is potentially destabilizing for any democracy and, as the authors note, one that Americans feel very acutely in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 storming of the Capitol. Surprisingly, this study found that plurality systems on their own had less in-group bias than RCV and non-STV proportional systems. However, as more parties were added, interparty animosity declined for RCV and proportional systems, but not plurality. This, according to the authors, implies that “electoral reform that does not lead to a change in the number of parties in a system may make interparty animosity worse.”³⁸ In light of this finding and the key takeaway of the Latner paper, reformers might consider whether creating space for more partisan diversity via increases to assembly size and district magnitude should be seen as prerequisites to implementing STV, or any form of proportional representation for that matter.

For current electoral reform practitioners, the implications of these 15 studies are substantial. Voting rights advocates can take advantage of new methods advanced under these projects for estimating seat-shares for minority groups and levels of racially polarized voting under different electoral systems. Voting educators and election officials can take heart that their work will likely increase satisfaction with, and understanding of, alternative voting systems, and they can reshape their strategies where needed in order to address vulnerabilities and prepare for likely challenges identified in the research. For those involved in communications, national surveys indicate that voters’ opinions are not susceptible to explanations of how RCV works, and it may be necessary to accentuate the flaws of the current system. Administrators and advocates alike who concern themselves with issues related to voting error and voided ballots can cite the findings from two reports that single-vote rules can yield more wasted ballots than RCV.

Moreover, practitioners can use results on the status quo bias and mistrust of “coming-from-behind victories” to fortify plans for targeted education and messaging campaigns, and perhaps consider forums such as citizen assemblies to give residents more opportunities to learn about the benefits and tradeoffs of the reform prior to enactment or implementation. For advocates of proportional systems like STV, these results may alleviate concerns among skeptics of RCV, or even win them over entirely. This is especially true for those who doubt STV’s ability to defend hard-earned representation in single-member districts. At the same time, findings about STV’s promise for minority representation can serve as an entry point into this space for voter equity activists who have long been skeptical of single-winner RCV.

From a research perspective, this collection of studies covered significant ground. Yet the ground itself has shifted since we launched ERRG in late 2019: increased mainstream attention on RCV—mainly owing to well-publicized campaigns in New York City, Alaska, and Massachusetts—has invited more public and pointed critiques of the system. These critiques tend to draw on the same small handful of papers. As the issue’s salience continues to build, we hope that those who report and comment on RCV will use this collection of research to expand their reference repertoires and use the researchers themsleves as resources.

At the same time, the shifting terrain is a reminder of the work left to be done to understand what it would actually look like if America implemented RCV and STV nationwide. Beyond extending and/or validating results already shared, we must also look to Alaska and its unique hybrid of a top-four primary and RCV general election; to new findings from New York City’s introduction of RCV to its primary and special elections in 2021; and to the impacts of RCV on campaign finance. And with more cities implementing RCV and existing RCV cities gaining more experience running RCV elections and then governing within an RCV context (and generating new data points all the while), not to mention the latest round of redistricting, there are more opportunities than ever to explore the interactions between electoral reform and representation, voter satisfaction, polarization, and policy outcomes.

On behalf of the Electoral Reform Research Group organizers, we are proud to present this collection of original research. Below you will find research briefs for the 15 papers we produced for this series, each one broken down into four parts: 1) overview of key questions and findings; 2) background and research design; 3) findings and implications; and 4) conclusion. Suggested citations for the individual working papers and briefs are listed below.