Idaho voters will decide next month whether to change the state’s elections through Proposition 1.
Yard signs are out in front of homes, and ads, blog posts and video clips online argue in favor and in opposition to the changes.
Proposition 1 has two components: changes to who can vote in the state’s primary elections, and changes to how votes are tallied in the general election. For primaries, everyone would vote in one primary that includes all candidates regardless of party; the top four would advance, even if more than one are from the same party. In the general election, voters could rank the four candidates, with their second and third choices becoming important if any of their preferred picks are eliminated for insufficient votes.
Later this month, Idaho Statesman opinion editor Scott McIntosh will host a live debate about the ballot measure (RSVP at IdahoStatesman.com).
Here’s a breakdown of some of the arguments, including a fact check of a few of the claims circulating about ranked choice voting (RCV):
How many other states have ranked choice voting?
Two have ranked choice voting statewide: Alaska and Maine, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some cities have adopted RCV for local elections or primary races. This fall, six other states and Washington, D.C., also will vote whether to adopt wide-ranging changes to their primary or general elections. Colorado, Nevada, Montana and Washington, D.C., will consider similar changes to Idaho’s proposal. Arizona and South Dakota will consider adopting nonpartisan primaries, and Oregon will consider ranked choice voting for primary and general elections. A group in Alaska opposed to that state’s system has brought forward a ballot measure to undo it.
Would Idaho’s reforms create an ‘open primary’?
Technically, an “open primary” usually refers to a primary election where voters can select which party’s primary they wish to vote in. For instance, a registered Republican could arrive at the polls and select to vote in the Democratic primary.
Idaho’s proposed reform would be distinct from such a system. Instead of allowing any voter to pick a specific party’s primary ballot, there would be a single primary ballot for all voters that would include every candidate, regardless of party. This is often called a “blanket primary.”
The Idaho Supreme Court pointed out this distinction in a ruling last year, and Republican officials have claimed that Proposition 1 proponents’ description of an “open” primary is subterfuge. In August, an Ada County judge roundly rejected these arguments, finding that the top four primary is a “type” of open primary, that further distinctions are matters of opinion, and that the proposition’s proponents have largely accurately described their petition on their website and in public presentations.
Jerry McBeath, an emeritus political science professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told the Idaho Statesman by phone that the two systems are distinct but “analogous,” because Idaho’s proposal would similarly allow any voter – regardless of party affiliation – to participate in selecting the primary’s nominees.
What are some common arguments in favor of ranked choice voting?
Proponents of RCV say the system results in more consensus winners. While plurality systems – sometimes called first-past-the-post – like Idaho’s can lead to winners who earn the most votes but less than a majority, RCV takes into account more information from each voter. If a voter’s favored candidate finishes last, that candidate is eliminated, and the voter’s preference instead goes to their next-highest choice — a process that continues in rounds until only two candidates remain, and one has a majority. For proponents, this system yields a result that makes the largest number of voters happy (or at least content), versus a system that can lead to a winner who has strong support from a large minority but not the backing of a majority.
Other supporters say RCV provides voters more room to vote their conscience. With RCV, a voter could put their favorite candidate as their first choice — even a third-party candidate with little chance of winning — knowing that if not enough other voters agree, their vote will still count in later rounds as a vote for their second-choice candidate.
What are common arguments against it?
Some opponents of RCV say it is too complicated — voters are used to picking one favored candidate, not ranking multiple. The standard plurality voting system is simpler and more familiar.
Others say it will make it less likely for their preferred candidates to win. Far-right Republicans in Idaho have said they think it will lead to more moderate outcomes in state elections — an outcome they disapprove of — and have pointed to results in other states.
Some say that it is unfair because the candidate with the most first-choice votes may not win if their tally does not surpass a majority.
RCV also likely would take longer for election officials to tally, delaying results. It would cost money to implement, too — potentially millions of dollars.
Does RCV force you to vote for more than one candidate?
No. While RCV allows voters to rank their preferences, it doesn’t require them to. If a voter likes only one candidate, they can mark that person as their preferred choice and leave the rest blank. However, if their preferred candidate gets eliminated because they have too few supporters, that voter’s preference would not affect subsequent rounds.
What has been the effect of ranked choice voting in other states?
McBeath said the RCV system has favored moderates in most — but not all — Alaska elections. He said this is because winning requires appealing to the broadest electorate, which means that some candidates with strong minority support don’t end up winning.
“The people who study voting say that ranked choice voting doesn’t necessarily lead to moderates always winning,” he said. “It’s just that in the historical cases we have, that seems to have been the effect.”
In 2022, Alaskans elected the first Alaska Native person to Congress, Democrat Mary Peltola. Peltola started with a wide lead when the votes were tallied, notching 49% of first-choice votes from voters. Former Gov. Sarah Palin and another candidate, Nick Begich, split much of the Republican vote, according to the election results.
Because Peltola’s tally was not an outright majority, the ranked choice winnowing began. Chris Bye, a candidate who got 1.9% of the vote, was eliminated. Anyone who voted for him as their first choice instead had their second-choice picks distributed to the remaining candidates.
Begich got the largest chunk of those second-choice votes — about 2,000 of them — and Palin and Peltola each got about 1,000. With Begich and Palin still trailing, Peltola’s tally inched up to just over 49% of the vote; still not enough for a majority.
So a third round ensued. Begich was the candidate with the fewest votes of the remaining three (he had 24% and Palin had 26%), so he was eliminated.
The vast majority of the voters who put Begich as their first choice put Palin as their second, giving her a windfall of more than 43,000 more votes. But about 7,500 of Begich’s voters put Peltola as their second choice.
At the end of the third round, Peltola had 55% of the vote to Palin’s 45%.
Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon said Proposition 1 would ‘take away your ability to vote for conservative lawmakers.’ Is that true?
This is false. Like they do today, Idaho voters could vote for any candidate they prefer in the primary elections, and they would have four candidates to pick from in the general election. Conservative candidates could still run for office, and residents could vote for them.
“These are all the kinds of nonsensical complaints that were made about the Alaskan system,” McBeath said. “After all, it was former President Trump who said that the top-four ranked choice voting was a ‘rigged’ system. And many of the Republican candidates said the same thing. But they’ve not been able to point out how it is dishonest. There’s nothing dishonest about it. It is just people using language to fortify their positions without any respect for the meaning of words.”
One Idaho lawmaker called it a ‘ploy to rig our elections in favor of the radical left.’ Is that true?
Ranked choice voting systems are not “rigged” in favor of any particular candidates. Like other types of elections, they have rules that determine winning candidates.
Would Proposition 1 make it less likely that far-right Republicans get elected? Perhaps. As mentioned, RCV systems in other states often have led moderate candidates to get elected. (A big caveat here is that there are not many examples of RCV in the U.S., so there is not a large sample of prior outcomes to review.)
“Politics is how one phrases things,” McBeath said of the more apocalyptic arguments made against RCV. “One’s ability to feed into popular distress and unease, angst, is often critical to one’s victory margin.”
McBeath said he expects conservative candidates who have a strong individual following to still win races, “they would just have to cover their bases better than they do now.”
Some Republicans have argued that ranked choice voting is less secure than other types of voting. Is there evidence of that?
“I have personally not seen evidence around that,” Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters in September at a news conference at the Idaho Capitol.
Emily Cook, a spokesperson for Maine’s secretary of state, told the Statesman by phone that her state’s elections are “free, safe and secure, period,” and that the switch to RCV has not made elections there any less secure.
She also said the state has conducted recounts of RCV races, and they have not been more difficult than doing so in plurality elections. The state will conduct its first election audits this winter.
Does ranked choice voting take longer to tabulate?
Generally, yes. For comparison, in Maine in 2022, it took eight days for final results in a race for Congress. But that was partly because Veterans Day fell on a Friday that year, leading to a three-day weekend when no votes were tallied.
In Maine, as would happen in Idaho, the RCV-specific tabulation only happens if there isn’t a majority winner in the first round. (In the 2022 presidential race, one Maine congressional district went for Trump by a majority, and the other went for Joe Biden, meaning that no further rounds of counting were needed.)
This year, without the holiday interfering, Cook said she expects any races that require ranked choice runoffs to be tallied by the end of election week.
Part of the time delay is because votes need to be physically collected from hundreds of municipalities around Maine and brought to the capital, Augusta. As in Idaho, the voting machines are not connected to the internet. Cook said the elections office works with state police to escort all the needed ballots to Augusta, after which they are processed and the RCV tabulation occurs.
One noteworthy difference between the two states: Maine’s electoral system is even more decentralized than Idaho’s, where the 44 county clerks collect the ballots in an election. In Maine, ballots are organized based on more than 500 municipalities.
It is more difficult to compare the length of time it takes to tabulate results in Alaska, because the state allows absentee ballots to arrive after Election Day, which already slows the counting process.
“As for the time to tabulate, it doesn’t take any longer than before,” Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher told the Statesman by email.
How much would this system cost in Idaho?
Secretary of State Phil McGrane has estimated that the new system would cost between $25 million and $40 million, based on a need to buy new voting systems in most of Idaho’s counties.
Idaho counties use voting machines made by Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic. The two companies’ products are certified by the state, and also approved by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — another requirement in state law. One of those, Hart, has recently applied to the state to certify an RCV voting system, but McGrane said he still expects many locales would need to buy new election equipment.
Figuring out what the new system would cost is complex. In an email, a spokesperson for Hart told the Statesman that its new system, if approved, could cost Idaho customers between $4.5 million and $6 million to purchase. (Six counties, including Ada and Canyon, use Hart’s machines, while the rest use ES&S or hand counts, according to Secretary of State spokesperson Chelsea Carattini.)
But it also could be feasible for Idaho counties to implement RCV without buying expensive new voting equipment, according to Chris Hughes, the senior director of policy at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps jurisdictions implement RCV systems. The nonprofit has an open-source RCV counting system, called RCTab, which has been used as an add-on to existing tabulation systems in other states, like California, which has its own voting system approval process, Hughes told the Statesman by phone. Idaho’s requirement that voting systems have approval from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is new for a state considering RCV, he said.
Hughes said he thinks there could be a path for one of the state’s existing vendors to get federal approval with RCTab as an add-on, and which would not require purchasing entirely new voting systems. He said he thinks $1.6 million — the cost estimate initially included with the Idaho ballot measure — could be a feasible statewide budget.
“Our goal is to make it as simple as possible to get RCTab in the hands of these jurisdictions,” he said. “I would hope that the system that comes out of (collaboration with voting companies) would be really affordable to people … I would expect you’d be able to make all of these software upgrades at the county and the state level for much less.”
Transitions to RCV in other states have cost significantly less than what McGrane has estimated for Idaho. In Alaska, switching cost $3.5 million. In Maine, it cost about $441,000.
Idaho Congressman Russ Fulcher said in a recent ad that RCV would ‘eliminate’ the concept of ‘one person, one vote.’ Is that true?
The merits of allowing voters to rank their preferences is, of course, debatable. But the assertion that RCV would give some voters more say than others is not correct.
In 2011, after some residents in San Francisco made a similar argument against that city’s RCV system, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their claims, saying they “mischaracterized” the system.
“The option to rank multiple preferences is not the same as providing additional votes, or more heavily-weighted votes, relative to other votes cast,” the court ruled. “Each ballot is counted as no more than one vote at each tabulation step, whether representing the voters’ first-choice candidate or the voters’ second- or third-choice candidate, and each vote attributed to a candidate, whether a first-, second- or third-rank choice, is afforded the same mathematical weight in the election. The ability to rank multiple candidates simply provides a chance to have several preferences recorded and counted sequentially, not at once.”
Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle recently wrote that, ‘While supporters claim that independent voters face obstacles to participation, these voters can already request and cast ballots in any party primary they choose.’ Is that true?
This is misleading. It is true that unaffiliated voters can go to the polls, register for a political party while they’re there and then vote in that party’s primary. That means an independent voter could show up at their polling place, register as a Republican, and then vote in the Republican primary. But then they would no longer be an unaffiliated voter.
As the Secretary of State’s website says: “Persons who are registered as ‘unaffiliated’ (meaning not affiliated with any political party) may not vote for partisan candidates in primary elections unless the party decides to allow them.”
Under Idaho law, voters can change their registration up until a little more than two months before primary Election Day. But the Idaho GOP wants voters previously registered with another political party to have to wait more than a year before they can register as a Republican. (McGrane has previously said that he cannot enforce the GOP’s rules, because they conflict with the law.)
Moyle also wrote that the RCV tallying process, “Because (it) is done by algorithms, it will be almost impossible for humans to verify the results, as we do today.” This is also misleading. Similar to how they do in plurality systems, elections offices in RCV systems maintain the records of vote counts. For instance, in Alaska, the RCV results from different rounds are viewable on the state’s election website.
