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Ranked Choice Voting: The Overhyped Mess That Promised Paradise and Delivered ChaosRanked Choice Voting was sold to us like a miracle cure for American elections. No more spoilers! Majority winners guaranteed! Civil campaigns where candidates court second-place love instead of torching each other! Voters finally get their “true preferences” expressed in a glorious multi-round symphony of democracy!
Spoiler alert: in Alaska 2022 and New York City’s 2021 mayoral primaries, the symphony sounded more like a toddler smashing a xylophone while the adults argued over the sheet music.Start with Alaska’s special House election in 2022. The state had just rolled out its shiny new Top-Four primary plus ranked-choice general, courtesy of a ballot measure that promised better representation and less polarization.
What happened?
In a deep-red state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to that seat in nearly half a century, Democrat Mary Peltola beat former Governor Sarah Palin. Cue the Republican meltdown, and for once they had a point about the system’s quirks.First-round results: Peltola around 40%, Palin about 31%, Republican Nick Begich roughly 28%. No majority, so Begich gets eliminated. His second-choice votes get redistributed. Most go to Palin, but enough leak to Peltola that she scrapes past 50% of the remaining ballots. Tom Cotton tweeted the obvious: roughly 60% of voters ranked a Republican first, yet a Democrat “won.”
Ballot exhaustion—those voters who ranked Begich and stopped—helped seal it. About one-fifth of Begich’s ballots just vanished from further counting.Even better for the “RCV fixes everything” crowd: Begich was the Condorcet winner. Head-to-head, more voters preferred him over both Peltola and Palin. RCV still tossed him first because of vote-splitting among Republicans. The system that was supposed to eliminate the spoiler effect delivered a textbook center-squeeze. Some analyses noted the perverse incentives: certain Palin voters would have been better off staying home entirely, because their participation helped eliminate the candidate they preferred over the eventual winner. Progressive Democrat wins in Republican Alaska not because she was the consensus choice, but because the ranking algorithm performed its little magic trick. And results took weeks because, you know, complexity. Peak democracy.
Then there’s New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s first big ranked-choice experiment. Voters could rank up to five candidates. Advocates promised it would force niceness and produce a broad-appeal winner. Instead, we got the New York City Board of Elections doing what it does best: spectacular incompetence.On election night, Eric Adams led in first-choice votes. Days later, the Board released ranked tallies showing his lead collapsing toward Kathryn Garcia—only to yank them hours later. Why? They had accidentally left 135,000 test ballots in the system. Dummy data mixed with real votes, published to the public, then sheepishly retracted. The agency that couldn’t clear test files was somehow going to flawlessly execute multi-round preference tabulation across a city of millions.
Final results dragged on for weeks. Adams ultimately won, but barely; Garcia came within about 8,000 votes after transfers. Exhausted ballots abounded. Voters who didn’t rank far enough simply disappeared from later rounds.Did RCV deliver the civil campaign utopia? Adams denounced a Yang-Garcia cross-endorsement as a racist plot. Campaigns still went negative. The process that was supposed to clarify the public will instead produced days of confusion, recriminations, and a fresh wave of distrust in the already-notorious Board of Elections. Ranked choice didn’t cause the test-ballot fiasco—pure administrative bungling did—but it layered extra complexity onto an agency that already struggled with basic counting.
When your shiny new voting method requires perfect software hygiene from people who leave dummy data in the live system, maybe the problem isn’t just the operators.These cases expose the gap between the glossy brochure and reality. RCV does not reliably produce “majority” winners of all ballots cast; it produces majorities of non-exhausted ballots after successive eliminations. It does not eliminate spoilers or guarantee the Condorcet consensus candidate. It slows results, invites exhaustion, and can punish sincere first-choice voting in multi-candidate fields.
In Alaska, it handed a Republican-leaning electorate a Democrat via second preferences and exhausted ballots. In New York it turned a primary into a public-relations dumpster fire complete with phantom votes.Defenders will insist the systems “worked as designed” and that critics are just sore losers. Fair enough—Peltola and Adams won under the rules. But the hype was never “it works as designed.” The hype was majority rule without runoff elections, reduced polarization, no spoilers, clearer voter intent, and smoother democracy. Alaska and New York delivered the opposite: delayed counts, exhausted ballots, Condorcet failures, administrative farce, and outcomes that left large chunks of the electorate feeling the process had gamed them.
Ranked Choice Voting remains a favorite of good-government types who treat complexity as sophistication. Actual elections keep showing that when you replace “pick one” with a ranking tournament, you don’t magically get consensus. You get more moving parts, more opportunities for exhaustion and elimination quirks, and more chances for the people running the system to screw it up in public. The next time someone tells you RCV is the future, point them to the Last Frontier and the five boroughs. The future looked a lot like the same old mess—just with extra steps and a longer wait for the final score.