Oakland gave us Jean Quan. Alaska gave us two Dan Sullivans. And RCV advocates want us to believe this is election reform?
Oh, ranked-choice voting. The gift that keeps on giving to election administrators, ballot designers, political consultants, and anyone who thinks voting should require a flowchart and a spreadsheet.
Remember when an election meant picking a candidate, casting a ballot, and counting the votes? How quaint! Now we’re told that voters need to rank candidates, understand elimination rounds, anticipate vote transfers, and apparently become amateur election mathematicians just to elect a mayor or senator.
But don’t worry. RCV advocates assure us it’s simple. They said that in Oakland, too.
Oakland: Just Ask Everyone to Make You Their Second Choice!
Let’s revisit Oakland’s 2010 mayoral election.
Jean Quan was running against political heavyweight Don Perata. Perata led in first-choice votes, receiving approximately 35 percent. Quan received approximately 24 percent. So what happened?
Quan’s campaign embraced the wonderful new political art of asking voters who preferred somebody else to please make her their second choice. That’s right. Instead of simply convincing voters she was the candidate they wanted, Quan went door to door asking people to rank her as their backup plan.
Imagine the campaign conversation:
“Who’s your favorite candidate?”
“Rebecca Kaplan.”
“Great! But if she doesn’t win, how about me?”
It’s the political equivalent of asking someone on a date and being told you’re their second choice. And then celebrating because you eventually got married. Quan ultimately defeated Perata after subsequent rounds of counting transferred votes from eliminated candidates. RCV supporters celebrated this as democracy in action.
Critics might reasonably ask a different question: If Perata received more first-choice votes, why should the election system be designed so that the candidate with fewer first-choice votes wins? The answer from RCV advocates is that first-choice votes aren’t everything. Well, apparently not anymore! Under this system, the winner is determined not simply by how many people initially chose a candidate, but by how voters rank the remaining candidates as others are eliminated. That’s a different definition of winning, and voters deserve to understand that before they enter the voting booth.
Alaska: Two Dan Sullivans Walk Into an Election…
And now we get to Alaska. For next week’s election. Next week.
The 2026 Senate race features an unusual wrinkle: incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and another Republican candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan. Two candidates. Nearly identical names. One Senate race. Naturally, this has become another opportunity for RCV enthusiasts to explain why their preferred voting system is the answer to practically every election problem.
The argument is that voters can rank the incumbent first and the other Sullivan second, or vice versa, depending on their preferences. If one candidate is eliminated, the vote can transfer to the next continuing candidate. Sounds simple enough, right?
Except there’s a rather obvious question: Why are we treating a confusing ballot situation as evidence that we need a complicated voting system? Perhaps the first solution should be better ballot design, clearer candidate identification, and more voter education. Just a thought.
And let’s be clear: RCV doesn’t prevent someone from accidentally choosing the wrong candidate. Ranking candidates doesn’t eliminate voter confusion. It simply provides additional choices that may or may not transfer depending on the tabulation.
If voters are confused about which Dan Sullivan they are voting for, adding a ranking exercise isn’t exactly a magic wand. This is vote splitting by a Democratic candidate and RCV said vote splitting can’t happen under their system.
The Second-Choice Political Economy
Here’s another little problem with RCV.
It changes campaign incentives. Instead of simply persuading voters to support you, candidates are encouraged to cultivate second-choice support from people who prefer their opponents. That might sound wonderfully cooperative in a PowerPoint presentation from an RCV advocacy organization. But what does it mean in practice? It means candidates can spend considerable time campaigning to be everyone’s backup plan. It means voters can support a candidate they actually want while simultaneously helping another candidate they may not particularly like. And it means that the candidate leading in first-choice votes can lose after the elimination rounds.
RCV advocates call this coalition building.
Skeptics might call it a system that makes the outcome harder for ordinary voters to anticipate. There’s also the question of exhausted ballots. When voters don’t rank additional candidates, their ballots can become inactive in later rounds. That means the final winner may receive a majority of continuing ballots without receiving a majority of all ballots originally cast. But don’t worry. There’s a mathematical explanation! Because nothing says voter-friendly democracy quite like explaining why a majority of voters who showed up aren’t necessarily included in the final round.
The Oakland Lesson Isn’t Necessarily the Lesson RCV Advocates Think It Is
Jean Quan’s victory is routinely presented as proof that RCV encourages candidates to build broader coalitions. Fair enough. That’s one possible interpretation. But there’s another way to look at it. A candidate who was not the first choice of the largest number of voters won after a complicated sequence of eliminations and transfers.
Whether voters consider that a feature or a bug depends on what they believe an election should accomplish. If the objective is to elect the candidate with the broadest ranked support, RCV has an argument. If the objective is to make elections transparent, understandable, and straightforward, RCV has some explaining to do. And let’s not pretend that RCV eliminates political gamesmanship. Campaigns still have incentives to influence rankings, discourage support for competitors, and strategize about transfers.
Politics remains politics. It just comes with more arithmetic.
Maybe We Should Fix Elections Without Making Voting Harder
There are legitimate questions worth asking about plurality elections. Vote splitting is real. Candidates with similar names can confuse voters. Crowded fields can produce winners with relatively small pluralities. But acknowledging those problems doesn’t automatically mean ranked-choice voting is the right answer.
There are alternatives worth discussing, including clearer ballot design, better voter information, and other election methods that seek majority support. Before governments rush to adopt RCV, voters deserve a full explanation of how ballots are counted, how votes transfer, what happens to exhausted ballots, and why the first-choice leader can lose. And they deserve to hear the criticisms, not just the glossy promotional material.
Oakland gave us a mayoral campaign built around asking voters to make a candidate their second choice. Alaska gave us two Dan Sullivans and another opportunity to debate whether ranked-choice voting actually solves the problems its advocates promise to fix.
So here’s a modest suggestion: Maybe voting shouldn’t require voters to figure out who their favorite candidate is, who their backup candidate is, who their backup’s backup is, and what happens when everyone else gets eliminated. It’s an election, not a reality-show elimination ceremony.
If RCV is such an obvious improvement, its advocates should be able to explain why without needing a flowchart.