If you’re an Irvine Voter, you’re bound to come across small groups of advocates for Ranked Choice Voting at a community event or shopping center near you. Just look for the purple shirts,
I’ve been doing deep dives into the pro-RCV claims for quite some time, and the more I read online posts from friends who favor RCV, I’m convinced they have taken the claims at face value without a deeper level of research. And they really should.
Measure D on the ballot in Irvine is about 5 weeks is the latest shiny object that progressive reformers wave around like it’s going to magically cure polarization, negativity, and the spoiler effect while delivering pure, unadulterated majority will.
Advocates have spent years overselling it as the electoral equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: eliminates spoilers, encourages nicer campaigns, produces “consensus” winners, and somehow makes voters feel more empowered. In practice, it’s a complicated, expensive distraction that trades the simple clarity of plurality voting for confusion, higher costs, and results that still leave plenty of people unhappy (almost as unhappy as the district representatives which have resulted in council members adding staff like they were elected to Congress and bloating Irvine’s city hall with staff expenses).
Plurality—plain old first-past-the-post—has its flaws, but at least it doesn’t require a user’s manual and a software upgrade every election cycle. Let’s start with the confusion problem, because that’s where the rubber meets the road for actual voters. Under plurality, you mark one candidate. Done. Under Ranked Choice Voting, you’re asked to rank them in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Sounds elegant in theory. In the real world, large numbers of voters don’t rank fully, rank incorrectly, or simply stop after one or two choices. Ballots get exhausted. Overvotes happen. Undervotes spike. Election officials then have to run iterative rounds of elimination, redistributing lower preferences until someone supposedly clears 50 percent. The process is opaque to most people who just want to cast a ballot and go home.
We’ve already seen the practical fallout. In places that have tried it, ballot error rates climb compared with simple plurality contests. Elderly voters, less frequent voters, and those for whom English isn’t the primary language face steeper hurdles. Advocates insist education campaigns will fix this. That’s code for “spend more money on mailers, videos, and training so people can navigate a system that didn’t need navigating before.” When the counting itself becomes a multi-day affair with sequential eliminations, public confidence takes a hit. People start asking why the winner wasn’t clear on election night. Plurality delivers a result the same evening in most cases.
RCV turns election night into election week, complete with algorithms and exhausted-ballot explanations that sound like excuses. Then there’s the cost. Advocates rarely lead with the price tag, for good reason. Implementing Ranked Choice Voting isn’t free. Jurisdictions need compatible voting equipment or software upgrades. Tabulation systems have to handle ranked data and run multiple rounds. Training for poll workers and election staff expands. Voter education campaigns become permanent line items. Audits and potential recounts grow more complex and therefore more expensive. When results are delayed or disputed, legal challenges multiply. Cities and states that have adopted RCV have documented these higher administrative costs, even as proponents claim long-term savings that somehow never quite materialize in the budget documents.
If Huntington Beach is forced to add RCV this year, they would bear the cost for upgrading the county system for RCV, but there’s no certainty that will happen. Maybe the better play is to push for a county-wide vote on implementing RCV so system costs and upgrades are shared by each city and jurisdiction in the county instead of placing the burden all on Irvine.
Compare that to plurality. The infrastructure already exists. Machines are calibrated for single-mark ballots. Counting is straightforward. Results are fast and transparent. No need for iterative redistribution software or elaborate public-education blitzes explaining why your third-choice candidate suddenly matters after your first two are eliminated. Taxpayers already fund elections; asking them to fund a more elaborate version that produces delayed outcomes and higher error rates is a hard sell outside the activist class.
The overstated benefits deserve scrutiny too. The claim that RCV ends the spoiler effect is only partially true and often oversold. In practice, exhausted ballots mean the final “majority” is calculated among remaining active ballots, not the full electorate. A candidate can still win with less than half of all voters who showed up.
Negative campaigning doesn’t magically disappear; candidates still attack, they just sometimes tailor the attacks differently. “Consensus” winners frequently look a lot like the candidates who would have won under plurality anyway, especially in polarized electorates. The system can even produce counterintuitive results where a candidate with broad second- and third-place support beats one with stronger first-place support, leaving a sizable chunk of the electorate feeling their clear preference was diluted by the math.
None of this is an argument that plurality is perfect. It can produce winners with pluralities well under 50 percent and it does create incentives for strategic voting and spoilers in multi-candidate fields. But those are known, manageable features of a simple system.
Ranked Choice Voting replaces them with a new set of problems—voter confusion, administrative complexity, higher costs, and delayed transparency—while delivering benefits that are narrower and less transformative than advertised.Reformers love complexity because complexity creates the appearance of sophistication.
Ranked Choice Voting fits the pattern: an intricate solution in search of a problem that plurality already handles with less friction and less expense.
One of the talking points debated online is that my counterpoints for RCV are Republican Talking points. If you live and Irvine and don’t have friends who are Republican, you’ve inadvertently hurt your efforts. Plurality voting is still the preferred method for 99.4% of the nation’s voting jurisdictions. RCV claims it’s the system used by 17 million people; then consider 220 million registered voters are using an easier way to vote. But by suggesting talking points against RCV are Republican talking points, you’ve motivated a huge chunk of Irvine’s voters against Measure D.
Hyping Irvine’s highly educated voters as being able to use RCV to eliminate spoiler candidates actually insults the intelligence of said voters using the plurality system. Do you think Irvine voters couldn’t tell the difference?
Lastly, for all those city commissioners who are pro-RCV and represent the city council members endorsing RCV, I’m going to call bullshit on your city council public comments where you’re “speaking for yourself.” When I hear that, my first thought is “I’m holding on to my commission appointment.” That may or may not be true, but that’s where my head goes when I hear it.
Before more jurisdictions rush to adopt it, they might ask whether the juice is worth the squeeze. So far, the evidence suggests voters and taxpayers are being sold a more confusing, more expensive product whose real-world performance has not matched the marketing brochure. Simple systems have virtues. Clarity and cost control are two of them. Ranked Choice Voting trades both away for a theoretical upgrade that looks better on a PowerPoint than at the precinct.
Now I know there’s a Pro-RCV Political Advocacy group is town; care to put RCV to a poll? It costs money. Not commissioning a poll just tells me they’d rather not spend the money.