Some problems with ranked choice voting

Britannica -    Con 1: Ranked-choice voting can eliminate the candidate with the most first-place votes, favor moderate candidates with only marginal support, and encourage scheming to get around these limitations. The winner in a ranked-choice election is the person who has received a majority of all votes in the final round. If the election process goes through several rounds, the candidate with the majority of votes in the first round may be eliminated. As Aaron Hamlin of the Center for Election Science explains:

Much of the time ranked-choice voting [RCV] isn’t getting any kind of majority at all. Rather, it’s contriving a majority by artificially narrowing down the candidate field. RCV knocks out candidates over each round, but sometimes it knocks out good candidates by mistake. 

Furthermore, candidates or voters may engage in schemes to tilt favor to one candidate or another, something that’s not at all far-fetched in the age of social media. For example, Hans von Spakovsky and J. Adams of the Heritage Foundation speculate:

If enough Ross Perot voters [1992 U.S. presidential election] had listed George H. W. Bush as their second choice over Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush might have won that presidential election instead of Clinton. Since Perot came in third in the race, his votes with Bush as the second choice would have counted for Bush in the second round of vote tabulation. 

RCV provides “voters with an incentive to tactically game the system and falsify their preferences for candidates,” so their “real” choice survives to the next round and can win in the end. 

Con 2: Ranked-choice voting disenfranchises voters, limiting their choices and “exhausting” their ballots. Although voters are able, and perhaps encouraged, to rank all candidates on their ballots, they do not always do so. Some voters may only support one or two candidates and find ranking candidates with whom they disagree strongly distasteful or even immoral. 

When the candidates on a voter’s ballot have been eliminated by the ranked-choice process, that ballot is “exhausted,” and that voter is effectively disenfranchised. 

A study of more than 600,000 ballots from four local elections found that the rate of ballot exhaustion ranged from 9.6 percent to 27.1 percent. This amounted to, according to the authors of the study, “a substantial number of votes being discarded in each election.”

Any voting system that tosses out votes and voters, or that reassigns a voter’s vote to a candidate the voter objects to for the creation of a fake majority, is wholly undemocratic.

Con 3: Ranked-choice voting complicates voting, delays results, and is more vulnerable to corruption.  In 2016 California Gov. Jerry Brown, Jr., vetoed a bill to expand ranked-choice voting in his state, calling it “overly complicated and confusing”; it “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.” 

...Moreover, ranked voting delays results. If no candidate wins a majority, the subsequent rounds of tabulation have to wait until all valid ballots have been counted. In Alaska, which uses ranked-choice voting for all elections, the second and later rounds of counting cannot even begin until 15 days after the election because the state continues to count absentee ballots. 

Finally, whenever additional rounds of tabulation are added to an election, the risk of election fraud is compounded, especially if the election is a national one. “Under a national popular vote, RCV faces enormous technical hurdles,” writes the Center for Election Science. “The nature of RCV tabulation requires that all the ballot data be centralized for tabulation. This creates both security and logistical concerns.…You’d [also] have to deal with holdout states still using our choose-one [candidate] method.…But you can’t add RCV and regular choose-one ballots together. It just doesn’t work.”