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Hans Von Spokowski: I'm Hans Von Spokowski with the Heritage Foundation. I'm Jason Sneed with the Honest Elections Project.
Trent Englund: I'm Trent Englund with Save Our States.
Hans Von Spokowski: And we have been working hard to guarantee that we have honest and fair elections. Some people
Trent Englund: want to radically change elections with a new confusing process called ranked choice voting, which should really be called rigged choice voting because it disenfranchises voters and can lead to political activists trying to game the system to allow marginal candidates to win elections. Instead of just voting for one candidate, their top choice in a race, voters are forced to rank all the candidates from their first choice to their last choice. Then those preference votes are counted and if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, officials begin rounds of elimination. Candidates with the least support are eliminated and the voters who selected that candidate as their number one choice or top choice automatically have their votes changed to their second choice and another round of vote tabulation occurs. This process continues until one of the candidates ends up with a majority, but the winning candidate may be the second, third, fourth, or even last choice of most of the voters who initially cast ballots.
Hans Von Spokowski: In a recent local California school board election using ranked choice voting, that's exactly what happened. But because ranked choice voting is so complex, nobody caught the mistake and the wrong winner was certified and installed in office after multiple rounds of vote counting. It took an outside audit to finally uncover the truth, and now the real winner has to sue to be recognized. That's just one problem with ranked choice voting. It also takes more time for voters to rank all of the candidates in a race and to fill out their ballots.
Trent Englund: That means longer lines to polls. The ballots themselves are more complicated to fill out, creating more room for errors and mistakes that may get mail in ballots thrown out. It requires more complicated and expensive voting equipment and puts more strain on poll workers who have to manage a much more complicated election system.
Jason Sneed: There's evidence that it discourages people from voting in the first place. And if voters don't rank all of the candidates in an election, their ballots run the risk of being thrown out and not counted in later rounds of vote tabulation. It took eight rounds of vote tabulation in the New York City mayor's race in 2021 over two weeks before the winner was determined. But the votes of more than 140,000 voters were thrown out and not included in the final count because they hadn't ranked all of the candidates in that race. It's no wonder then that some places have tried ranked choice voting only to repeal it.
Trent Englund: Aspen, Colorado experimented with ranked choice voting in 2009, then voted overwhelmingly to get rid of it after only a single election. Voters in Alaska are organizing a campaign to repeal ranked choice voting there, which barely passed in a referendum election in the first place. And in Utah, where state lawmakers have allowed cities to experiment with ranked choice voting, many are expressing serious concerns that ranked choice voting is a bad process that doesn't deliver on its promises and implements a confusing, chaotic voting system.
Hans Von Spokowski: Voters want elections to be easier, more secure, and more transparent.
Trent Englund: Ranked choice voting makes voting harder and is the wrong choice for our elections. Ranked choice voting is a solution in search of a problem.