By Aaron Flanigan | AMAC Contributor
As conservatives celebrate Donald Trump’s return to the White House alongside new Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, the GOP’s optimism for the future is at an all-time high. Yet amid the celebration, one crucial victory for American democracy has gone largely overlooked: voters’ decisive rejection of ranked-choice voting (RCV).
On November 5, along with putting their confidence in conservative policies, voters also overwhelmingly rejected state-level ballot initiatives that would have elevated deeply problematic RCV in six states. After left-wing entities—often masquerading as nonpartisan centrist organizations—spent millions of dollars selling RCV as a win for “democracy” while masking its dangerous implications, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon loudly said “no” to the experiment.
Notably, AMAC Action has been a leading organization in opposing RCV this year and in previous election cycles, working alongside other conservative organizations to raise awareness about how RCV undermines the democratic process.
RCV, according to FairVote, one of the main organizations advocating for the practice, “makes our elections better by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference.” Ballots that “do not help voters’ top choices win,” the group states, “count for their next choice”—resulting in a process that RCV proponents say yields “better choices, better campaigns, and better representation.”
Though RCV remains a relatively new innovation within the national American political landscape, in recent years, it has gained significant traction—mostly among Democrats, progressive activists, and self-proclaimed political centrists.
During the 2024 cycle, only two states—Alaska and Maine—used RCV in statewide elections; however, the practice was employed by 12 cities across six states for local elections.
“Ranked-choice voting is having a moment,” NBC News reported last year.
And for center-left political operatives, it’s no wonder why.
During the 2022 midterm election season, RCV was widely credited with the defeat of conservative candidates like former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who came up short against Democrat Mary Peltola in a U.S. House special election, despite Alaska’s status as a solid red state.
“Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said after Peltola was declared the winner. “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat ‘won.’”
This year, the system was credited with delivering Democrat Jared Golden, an outspoken progressive, a fourth term as Congressman for Maine’s 2nd congressional district by a razor-thin margin—even though Donald Trump carried the district by nearly 10 points.
But opposition to RCV encompasses much more than the risk of Republican losses. As conservatives have long observed, RCV disenfranchises voters by imposing an overly elaborate voting process that makes it far more difficult for the candidate with a simple majority of votes to win.
As Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow and election law expert at the Heritage Foundation, noted of the initiative, RCV is really nothing more than “a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections.”
He continued: “In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and for preserving our great republic. So-called [RCV] reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.”
As von Spakovsky further noted in a January 2023 report, the RCV tabulation process is highly prone to errors and complications. In a 2022 California school board election, for instance, county officials admitted two months after the race was called that they had incorrectly tabulated the votes and thus declared the wrong winner.
In the 2021 New York mayoral race, the Heritage report further notes, “it took eight rounds of vote counting of the 10 candidates during two weeks’ time before a final winner was announced”—and more than 140,000 ballots had been thrown out because they were filled out improperly. In Alaska in 2022, a full three rounds of voting took place before the winner was ultimately declared—and even then, more than 15,000 ballots were thrown out.
But fortunately, on November 5th, voters showed up to the polls to reject the practice virtually everywhere it appeared on the ballot—a decisive win for clarity of voting procedures, the simplicity of ballot instructions, and above all, the integrity of democratic process.
In Idaho, nearly 70 percent of voters rejected the measure. According to The Daily Wire, the practice was shot down by voters in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada “harder and faster” than voters rejected Kamala Harris. And even in the blue havens of Colorado and Oregon, the measure was defeated by double-digit margins.
Furthermore, as The Daily Wire reported, “Alaska appears on track to repeal RCV after using it for just two years.” And Missouri became the first state to ban the measure outright. Though the practice won the approval of voters in deep-blue Washington, D.C., nearly everywhere else in the nation, it appears the nefarious practice is on its way out the door.
For the past several years, the Democrat Party has been engaged in a relentless campaign to paint the GOP as an existential threat to democracy. But by loudly defeating RCV nearly everywhere it was offered to voters this fall, the American people not only flipped the script and countered the left’s false narrative, but also delivered a victory for the sanctity of the ballot box that will bolster American democracy and empower the American voter for years to come.
