RCV Risks

RCV is harder for voters

In an RCV election, voters may get more power if they rank more candidates. But that means, rather than identifying one candidate to support, voters must research multiple candidates and form opinions about their relative preferences for as many as four or more. This benefits those who have more time and access to information. In other words, RCV gives more power to elites while making it harder for everyone else.

An RCV ballot is also longer and takes more time for voters to complete. This means more delays and longer lines at polling places. It also creates many new opportunities to make a mistake, increasing the chances that a voter’s intent is not correctly recorded or that ballots are disqualified and discarded.

RCV is harder for election administrators

Special election equipment is necessary to scan ballots and count votes in RCV elections. For Idaho jurisdictions, this will require expensive updates and retraining of staff. RCV also means longer ballots that use more paper, cost more to print, and take longer to scan. And the multiple rounds of tabulation cannot even begin until every single ballot is processed and all the data centralized. For example, Alaska does not even attempt to begin tabulation with RCV until 15 days after Election Day.

RCV destroys transparency

RCV elections in Idaho would require multiple rounds of tabulation that rely on computers to make adjustments and discard ballots in each round. There is no way to quickly or manually confirm the accuracy of the computer processes involved. This is why, in an RCV election in California, a data entry error went undetected and the wrong winner was certified. These errors have happened multiple times.

RCV weakens accountability

Recounts, sometimes by hand, are required to verify results in close or questionable elections. RCV makes this more difficult, and in some cases could make it impossible. But RCV also makes it more likely because each round presents a new opportunity for a close margin. The complexity of multi-round RCV elections with many candidates and millions of ballots, could make a hand recount impossible within the time required to certify an election in Idaho.

RCV lowers voter turnout

Implementing RCV lowers voter turnout rates. For example, both Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, have run local elections using RCV for more than a decade, and both lag well behind other major metropolitan cities in municipal election voter turnout.

In fact, comparatively lower voter turnout in jurisdictions using RCV is a consistent pattern. A study of San Francisco elections from 1995 to 2011 demonstrated a strong relationship between a decline in voter turnout and the adoption of RCV. Furthermore, during odd or off-cycle election years, RCV jurisdictions have, on average, eight percent lower voter turnout rates than non-RCV jurisdictions.

Because RCV is more complex than traditional voting, the system discourages new and infrequent voters from participating. Between voter confusion, high rates of ballot exhaustion, and the difficulty of tabulating the results, RCV increases the opportunity costs of electoral participation.

RCV silences voters

In traditional elections, every submitted ballot that follows the instructions is counted towards the result, but this isn’t the case with RCV.

“Exhausted ballots” in RCV elections do not count towards the final tally. While many RCV ballots are thrown out due to voter error in following convoluted instructions, ballots that follow the instructions to the letter can also be thrown away because the voter ranked candidates who are no longer in contention. As candidates are eliminated through multiple rounds of tabulation, voters have their ballots exhausted if they only ranked candidates that have been removed during successive rounds.

In other words, for a voter’s voice to fully count in every round of an RCV election, he must vote for all candidates on the ballot, even those he may not support.

Because of ballot exhaustion, winners of RCV races do not necessarily represent the choice of all voters who participated. RCV claims to protect majority rule, but in reality, RCV creates an artificial majority by eliminating the votes of the lowest-scoring candidates during successive tabulations. One study of Maine elections found that, of 98 recent RCV elections, 60 percent of RCV victors did not win by a majority of the total votes cast.