Administration and Campaign Costs

Ranked-choice voting (usually) eliminates the need for local runoffs and statewide primaries. That means lower net costs for localities, taxpayers, and candidates. However, jurisdictions that want to implement RCV should be prepared for significant upfront costs to cover things like voting equipment and voter education programs.

In 2018, a cost analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute concluded that future savings resulting from RCV implementation more than justify the short-term costs of updating voting equipment.”¹ In 2019, the New York Independent Budget Office estimated that RCV implementation would cost between $100,000 to $500,000 up front, but would ultimately save the city up to $20 million per election cycle.²

Though it’s still a long shot, federal legislation could also reduce the cost of implementation. For example, the Voter Choice Act, sponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), would cover half of all implementation costs incurred by states and municipalities.

An MIT Election Lab report by Christopher Rhode found that switching from a traditional voting method to RCV was not the money saver for municipalities that advocates had hoped, but that the change didn’t cost them more either. Rhode collected election cost data from seven municipal governments that implemented RCV between 2004 and 2011 and from seven control municipalities. Election costs during or following RCV implementation were not found to be statistically significant. Interestingly, the local governments that adopted RCV were spending significantly more on elections than matched cities even before they made the switch, and continued to do so during and after the transition. This could be indicative of RCV cities having more political will to invest in their election administration, regardless of voting system. Unusually high election costs prior to RCV adoption could also help explain why those cities supported reform, in which case the lack of significant cost savings that Rhode observed is something residents should be aware of and worth investigating further. Specifically, researchers should update the Rhode study to cover the decade of RCV elections that have occurred since 2011. Future research could also control for the proportion of actual RCV elections in RCV cities (in some places, RCV is used for only one or two of the total elections being run in a given cycle), or whether the RCV election was single- or multi-winner.

Another research priority would be to establish a solid baseline for cost comparison: before we can credibly estimate potential cost savings for municipal governments considering RCV, we need to have a better grasp of how much cities are already spending on local elections. One immediate step researchers might take is to survey America’s 100 largest cities to determine if they have runoffs, their runoff threshold (if any), how frequent runoff elections are, and how much runoff elections cost.

Regarding campaign costs, we need more research into the impacts of RCV on campaign finance and the flows of money in RCV elections. Because early RCV elections attracted on average more candidates than the plurality elections that preceded them, total spending should be higher as well. Also, recent electoral reforms have been associated with more money in campaigns. Seth J. Hill found that implementing nonpartisan primaries and reforming partisan primaries lead to estimated 9 and 21 percent increases in individual campaign contributions per cycle. California’s switch to nonpartisan top-two primaries generated an increase in about $18 million in contributions compared to states that did not reform.³

But do individual candidates, both incumbents and challengers, experience campaign fundraising differently with RCV? Does it take more or less money to run a competitive RCV campaign than a standard first-past-the-post campaign? Jesse Clark’s working paper used campaign spending and independent expenditure data from Maine to explore questions about how RCV affects the tone of campaigns, but the data could be reused to analyze whether RCV was associated with changes in direct campaign and independent expenditures per candidate. Campaign finance data from local races, while often more challenging to obtain, can also be harnessed to estimate individual campaign costs.

This measurement has important implications for candidate emergence. The high cost of running for office, especially as a challenger or for an open seat, is a greater deterrent to would-be female candidates than male candidates.⁴ Gender disparities are reduced when women candidates are recruited and financially supported by a major party. Modest evidence that women and minority women perform better in an RCV campaign environment compared to that of a plurality campaign could induce parties to not just recruit more women and minority women but assure adequate financial support to offset concerns about cost.

Similarly, would-be moderates are less inclined to run as challengers in primary races knowing that extreme challengers are often backed by individual donors and private interests. Unless would-be moderates possess great personal wealth, they are more likely to depend on major party financing. It would be helpful to know whether RCV and/or STV changes how major parties allocate campaign funds, and to whom.

Research should also explore the question of whether RCV inflates the power of money in campaigns, particularly for challengers running in nonpartisan elections or in jurisdictions that are heavily lopsided in favor of a single party. A 2018 study by Steven Sparks found that: "In the absence of differentiating party cues to guide vote choice, the information provided by campaign expenditures has a much larger effect for increasing challenger vote share and overcoming the advantages inherent to incumbency. Put simply, challengers in one-party contests are able to get a bigger bang for their buck, which better equips them to overcome the inherent advantage.”⁵ Though these findings were not based on RCV election data, they provide a methodological and empirical basis for studying how campaign finance affects electoral fortunes among candidates in an RCV setting.