Last week, voters in half a dozen Western states rejected ballot measures that would have overhauled how elections are conducted.
Four states — Oregon, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada — resoundingly rejected ranked-choice voting initiatives. Alaska is still awaiting a final verdict on whether it will keep or repeal its own ranked-choice voting system. And in Arizona and Montana, ballot measures mandating open primaries were also defeated.
The results are a serious loss for election reform advocates, in a year that had been hailed as a history-making one for creating a ranked-choice alternative to the traditional two-party voting system. Whereas the current system holds separate primary elections for Democrats and Republicans, ranked-choice voting combines the primary and general elections, listing all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, on a single ballot, and tallying the winner through multiple rounds of counting.
Political action committees dedicated to democratic system reform, including Unite America and Article Four, collectively doled out more than $28 million in support of ranked-choice voting ballot measures across the West, vastly outspending their competition. However, organizers across the board struggled to convince voters that the benefits of the change would be worth the cost and confusion.
“It’s not just that these (measures) went down so solidly — they went down in solidly Democratic states,” said Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University who studies electoral issues. This year’s substantial losses will likely stall state-level efforts for years to come, he added.
Ranked-choice ballots allow voters to indicate their support for multiple candidates, ranking them from first to last. If any candidate wins more than 50% of first-choice votes, they win outright. But if no one captures a majority, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their ballots are redistributed to the voters’ second-choice candidate. The ballots are then tallied again, until a candidate wins a majority.
Advocates say that this system offers a more equitable playing field for third-party candidates while empowering millions of independent voters by enabling them to vote in open elections. It may also save governments money in the long run by combining primary and general elections into a single vote.
The system is already in place in cities and counties across the West, including Salt Lake City, Utah, Palm Desert, California, and Benton County, Oregon. In 2023, nearly half of the 300 electees were women in the 41 cities where ranked choice voting determines city council seats, compared to less than a third of those who held office the previous year.
The data is still relatively new, however, and some voters have begun to push back against the reform. In Alaska, one of the first states to approve and establish ranked-choice voting, a 2022 special election produced a startling result: Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the first Alaska Native member of Congress, won against two Republicans — Nick Begich, seen as somewhat centrist, and the more conservative former Gov. Sarah Palin. When none of the three candidates won the majority of the first-choice votes, Begich was eliminated, and Palin lost in the second round.
The outcome sparked outrage among Republicans, who blamed the new system for Peltola’s win. Though it is difficult to determine the broader impacts of ranked voting in a single race, the upset was enough to polarize opinions. (Peltola later won again in the November election, and this year Begich and Peltola competed for the same House seat, in an election that remains undecided as we go to press.)
Following the Alaska runoff, Republican leaders denounced ranked-choice voting, decrying the system as “rigged.” In Idaho, Republican lawmakers passed a resolution against it in January 2023 and eventually enacted legislation to prohibit it altogether. Republicans passed a similar law in Montana.
In November, this year’s ballot measures were rejected 70%-30% in Idaho and 58%-42% in Oregon, suggesting that they were opposed by some Democrats as well. Within progressive camps, ranked voting can also be viewed as discriminatory, because it requires voters to research multiple candidates and thus shifts the electorate in favor of voters with the time and energy to do so. If voters choose only one candidate, for instance, and that candidate does not advance beyond the first round, their vote is considered “exhausted” and no longer counted.
Following the Alaska runoff, Republican leaders denounced ranked-choice voting, decrying the system as “rigged.”
Mathilda Guerrero, government relations director for the Native Vote Alliance in Nevada, said that “exhausted” ballots are part of why she voted against her state’s Question 3.
As a nonpartisan voter, she supports the notion of open primaries, but she felt that much of the push for ranked choice was coming from out of state and funded by large PACs, rather than from grassroots coalitions in Nevada. “Some facets of (Question 3) are pretty great,” Guerrero said. “But the way that they’re choosing to implement it is just not the right way.”
It’s extraordinarily expensive to land a statewide measure on the ballot, said Donovan of Western Washington University, so local organizers often have to find funding from out of state. From the donors’ perspective, he said, Western states are fertile ground for experimental ballot initiatives because they offer relatively low barriers for measures to come before a vote. After last week’s losses, he said that election reform advocates may turn their attention to state and local efforts.
Russell Luke, a political science professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said that he’s still holding out hope that Alaska’s ranked voting system will be upheld. Speaking as an individual, outside his professional role, he said that he considers it a worthwhile experiment, though its benefits may not be obvious for another decade.
“(It) helps keep the main parties honest,” he said. “If there is a credible threat, either from the right, from the left or from the center to their dominance, they have to do a better job in order to win the vote.”
