Watch How Ranked-Choice Voting Complicates Elections And Disenfranchises Voters

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) leads to voter disenfranchisement and chaotic elections, a newly released video shows.

Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

Published by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the two-minute-long explainer video showcases how the use of RCV in elections leads to confused voters and discarded ballots. It highlights the issue of “ballot exhaustion,” a term used to describe what happens when voters select only one candidate on their ballot and then have their ballots tossed because their first choice didn’t win a majority in the first round.

A study published by FGA last year discovered thousands of “exhausted” ballots that were discarded in states and localities that have employed RCV in recent elections. In Alaska’s 2022 special congressional election, for example, more than 11,000 of the almost 15,000 “exhausted” ballots were thrown out because those electors “voted for only one Republican candidate and no one else.” Meanwhile, more than 8,000 ballots were deemed “exhausted” and effectively thrown out in a 2018 Maine congressional race, according to FGA.

“The result is that a much smaller, manufactured pool of voters ultimately decides the election to the exclusion of thousands of other voters,” the video narrator said.

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