Saturday’s mail brought a Pro-Rank Choice Voting flier to my Irvine Mailbox, addressed to my daughter and not my wife or me, so if someone was supposed to purge the database, lousy job.
‘And the pro-RCV team is still playing its greatest hits — claims that don’t match factchecking.
YOUR VOTE ALWAYS COUNTS
No — ranked-choice voting (RCV) does not guarantee that every vote will count toward the final result. It can reduce wasted votes compared with a traditional winner-take-all election, but ballots can still become inactive, and a voter’s lower-ranked choices may never affect the outcome. It becomes an exhausted ballot.
BETTER CAMPAIGNS (encourages a stronger, more diverse field of candidates to enter the race)
A 2025 American Journal of Political Science study found no statistically significant increase in the share of female or non-White candidates after RCV adoption.
A 2026 study in the American Journal of Political Science identifies an important limitation: when voters’ preferences are divided along strong partisan, ethnic, or cultural lines, candidates may have incentives to target particular groups rather than broaden their appeal.
But the strongest available evidence does not establish that RCV itself reliably produces a more diverse candidate pool.
PROVEN TO WORK (RCV used successfully in many California cities for more than 20 years)
”Many” means six cities in all of California use RCV instead of plurality voting.
As of October 2026, the United States overwhelmingly uses plurality voting, while ranked-choice voting (RCV) is used in a small minority of election jurisdictions. The key distinction is that the U.S. has more than 10,000 election-administration jurisdictions, while approximately 49 jurisdictions are identified by FairVote as using RCV in public elections or having adopted it for upcoming elections, according to its March 2026 count. So 99.51% of the country doesn’t use RCV.
STRICT SAFEGUARDS FOR TAXPAYERS
The Orange County ROV is not set up for RCV; they don’t know how much it will cost. And if Irvine is the only city to go for RCV, the cost will be Bourne by the city which is already spending too much than it did four years ago. A cost cap as protection for taxpayers is like counting on winning the lottery for your retirement.
REJECT TRUMP’S ANTI-DEMOCRACY AGENDA
STOP TRUMP AND MAGA; Trump won twice without 50% of the vote; extreme candidates lose when elections require a true 50% majority. Let me take you back to 1992 and 1996 and 2000. Bill Clinton was elected and re-elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. George W. Bush wan also elected with less than 50% of the vote. John F. Kennedy had 49.7%. Richards Nixon won in 1968 with 43%. Anyone writing this flier take American History of study political science? With only 49 voting jurisdictions using RCV, stating it will reduce right wing extremism is simply not provable.
If I was grading this as a paper, it’s get an F. Most claims not supported by facts. I’ll leave this post with a simple fact:
Plurality voting is one way to implement democratic elections, but it does not necessarily mean that the winner has the support of a majority of voters.