Ranked-Choice Voting: The Algorithm That Wants to Replace Your Vote

Every few years, some new reform arrives in a cloud of good intentions, promising to fix democracy. We have heard this pitch before: campaign finance reform, independent redistricting commissions, open primaries. Now it is ranked-choice voting. Twelve states and dozens of cities have adopted it. Alaska and Maine use it statewide. The advocates are earnest, well-funded, and utterly convinced that this algorithmic tinkering will reduce polarization, eliminate negative campaigning, and produce winners that truly represent the majority.

Here is the problem: they think they know your second choice better than you do. That is not an exaggeration. Under ranked-choice voting, the ballot asks you to rank candidates in order of preference. If no one gets a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their ballots are reallocated to the next choice listed. This process repeats until someone crosses fifty percent. The whole thing is automated, opaque, and fundamentally opposed to how free people actually choose their representatives.

What we have here is a textbook case of what Friedrich Hayek called the pretense of knowledge. It is the assumption that a central planner, in this case an election algorithm, can aggregate dispersed, subjective preferences into a better outcome than the simple, messy, decentralized act of one person casting one vote for one candidate. And like every form of central planning, it produces unintended consequences that leave us less free and less accountable.

The Seen and the Unseen

Henry Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, taught us to look beyond the immediate effects of a policy and consider the long-run effects on all groups. The seen benefit of ranked-choice voting is clear: it eliminates the need for a separate runoff election, saving time and money. Voters rank once, and the system produces a winner with a simulated majority. What is not to like?

The unseen consequences are far more important. First, ranked-choice voting fundamentally changes who holds power and how representation works. In a simple plurality or two-round runoff, the winner is the candidate with the most genuine, first-choice support. That winner knows exactly which voters put them in office, and those voters know exactly what they voted for. There is a direct line of accountability.

Under ranked-choice voting, the winner may be someone who was nobody's first choice. They survived by accumulating second- and third-choice scraps from eliminated candidates. In the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, Eric Adams won a clear plurality of first-choice votes, about thirty-one percent in a crowded field. But under an earlier version of ranked-choice voting, a different candidate could have won by assembling a coalition of anyone-but-Adams second choices. The eventual winner owes their election not to a group of voters who preferred them above all others, but to voters who preferred them least among the alternatives. That is not representation. It is algorithmic arbitration.

Second, ranked-choice voting changes the incentives for candidates. They no longer need to appeal to a defined constituency of supporters who will vote for them first. Instead, they need to be the acceptable second choice of everyone else. This pushes candidates to blur their distinctives, avoid taking strong stands, and court the mushy middle. The result is not less polarization. It is less clarity. Voters get candidates who are designed by focus group to offend as few people as possible. That is the bland, technocratic consensus that gave us the administrative state in the first place.

The Constitutional Republican's Objection

The American Founders gave us a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. They understood that the purpose of elections is to produce a representative who can govern with a clear mandate, not to construct a mathematically optimal consensus by eliminating dissenters.

James Madison warned in Federalist Number Ten that the danger of faction is best controlled by enlarging the sphere and refining public views through representation. But representation means a distinct person chosen by a distinct group of voters. Ranked-choice voting blurs that connection. It treats every election as an exercise in preference aggregation, as though we were choosing a restaurant for a group dinner. But we are not choosing a restaurant. We are choosing a person who will wield coercive power over our lives, over our taxes, our liberties, our children's education. That person must be accountable to a specific constituency, not to a reanimated coalition of second choices.

Moreover, the Constitution was designed to make government difficult. The separation of powers, bicameralism, the veto, all of these slow down majorities and protect minority rights. Ranked-choice voting accelerates the formation of manufactured majorities. It provides a veneer of consensus for policies that might never survive a direct majority vote. In a two-round system, the second round is a clear up-or-down choice between two candidates. Everyone understands it. Ranked-choice voting hides the elimination process inside a black box. Voters see the final result but not the steps that produced it. This is democratic legitimacy by obscurity.

The Data Does Not Lie, But It Is Not the Whole Truth

Proponents point to studies showing that ranked-choice voting reduces negative campaigning and increases voter satisfaction. In some local races, that is probably true. When candidates do not know whose second-choice votes they might need, they are less likely to attack opponents. But the studies also show higher rates of ballot exhaustion, where voters' ballots are discarded because they did not rank enough candidates. In a 2022 ranked-choice election in San Francisco, over twelve percent of ballots were exhausted. Those voters effectively had no say in the final round.

More importantly, ranked-choice voting can produce winners who would have lost a head-to-head matchup against the first-choice plurality leader. In the 2022 Alaska special election for United States House, Democrat Mary Peltola won under ranked-choice voting after Republican Sarah Palin led in first-choice votes by a wide margin. Ranked-choice advocates celebrated Peltola's broad appeal. But critics noted that a simple runoff between Palin and Peltola would likely have produced a different result. The algorithm effectively disqualified the candidate with the most core support in favor of one who survived on transfers. Is that democracy? Or is it a rigged game where the rules favor the candidate who can best game the ranking system?

The Real Motive

Let us be honest about who is pushing ranked-choice voting and why. The biggest backers are progressive foundations, tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, and good-government groups funded by the same donor class. Their stated goal is to reduce polarization. But the actual effect, and I suspect the intended effect, is to break the link between geographic communities and their representatives.

Ranked-choice voting favors candidates who can assemble a coalition from across the ideological spectrum. That means centrists, incumbents, and candidates with deep-pocketed backing who can afford to run expensive ranked-choice education campaigns. It rewards marketing over message, coalition-building over conviction, and ambiguity over principle. In other words, it is a system designed by and for the political class to protect itself from populist insurgents.

Consider the 2022 Alaska Senate race. Incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski faced a Trump-backed challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. Under a traditional primary and general election, Murkowski might have lost. But under the state's new ranked-choice system, Murkowski survived by picking up second-choice votes from Democrats and independents who preferred her over Tshibaka. The system insulated an establishment incumbent from a genuine challenge. That is not a bug. It is a feature.

A Better Way

If the goal is to ensure that the winner has majority support, the solution is simple and time-tested: the two-round runoff system. Let voters pick their favorite in a first round. Hold a runoff between the top two if no one reaches fifty percent. That is transparent, accountable, and respects the principle that the winner should be preferred by a majority over the alternative, not by a constructed coalition of second choices.

Or, even simpler, accept that plurality rule has worked for two hundred and fifty years. A candidate who gets forty percent of the vote in a five-way race is still the person the most voters chose above all others. That is a mandate, not a perfect one, but a real one. And real mandates produce real accountability.

Ranked-choice voting is a solution in search of a problem. It is a classic example of the unconstrained vision that Thomas Sowell described: the belief that human institutions can be redesigned from the top down to produce better outcomes than the spontaneous, messy, decentralized order of free people making their own choices. It is central planning for the ballot box.

The Founders gave us a republic. Let us not let the algorithm take it away.