Finding Common Ground--Ranked Choice Voting

The Estes Valley Democrats are hosting a discussion of “Ranked Choice Voting” on Wednesday, June 5, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. at the Library’s Hondius Room. This meeting is open to the public and features guest speaker, Linda Templin, Executive Director of RCV for Colorado.

Ranked Choice Voting (“RCV”) is used in many other countries and in some places in the U.S. With RCV, we vote only one time, but we rank candidates in order of our preference – first, second, third, etc.

Although voting is still done only once, vote counting can occur multiple times until there is a majority winner. For instance, in Round #1, all of the voter’s first choices are counted. If one candidate has more than half the vote, that candidate wins and the election is decided. However, if no one candidate has a majority of the vote, another round of vote counting occurs by eliminating the candidate who had the fewest votes in Round #1. The eliminated candidate’s votes are reallocated to those voters’ second choices, and these new voter totals result in Round #2. This elimination and reallocation continues until a candidate receives more than half the votes. The results of each stage of vote counting are public, so early leads are known.

A real world example happened in November 2018 in Maine which adopted RCV in 2016 to elect its U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, Governor, and State Legislators. In Maine’s 2018 race for a U.S. Representative’s seat, there were multiple candidates – including a Republican (Poliquin), a Democrat (Golden), and several other parties. After the first vote counting, Poliquin had 46.1% of the vote, Golden had 45.9%, and other parties accounted for 8% in total. After sequential rounds of counting ranked votes eliminated and reallocated the lower candidates, the final result was Golden winning with 50.53% compared to Poliquin’s 49.47%. The result: everyone’s votes were counted, and one candidate was elected by a majority of the vote.