Ranked-Choice Voting? What’s that?

By Scott Reif
The Ramspondents

More than three years ago in 2022, Fort Collins City Council passed a ballot measure that would change mayoral and councilmember elections with three or more candidates from a traditional, plurality-style voting system to a new system – that of ranked-choice voting – starting in November of 2025. Now, as that date approaches along with the city’s first taste of the change, many voters are wondering: “What is ranked-choice voting, and how does it work?”

The Ramspondents spoke with Sam Houghteling – political science lecturer and program director for the John Straayer Center for Public Service and leadership – as well as Martin Carcasson – communications studies professor and founder of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation – to answer this question and a few others voters may have about ranked-choice voting.

HOUGHTELING: “Ranked-choice voting allows voters to rank all candidates. You still get one vote, but in that one vote, you get to put; ‘This is my top choice, this is my second choice, this is my third choice,’ et cetera. When the votes are tabulated, if no one in the initial round gets 50% or more of the vote, the folks who voted for the candidate with the least amount of votes get their vote reallocated to their second-choice vote. This process continues until we have someone with more than 50% of the vote.”

CARCASSON: “If there’s five candidates, (voters) can rank up to all five of them in order. If no one has a majority, it drops whoever has the lowest vote.”

HOUGHTELING: “Many communities, especially at the local level, have shifted toward ranked-choice voting systems because it allows for multiple candidates to compete. Right now, plurality election systems really benefit two parties. There’s this idea that people will naturally gravitate to and arrange themselves in two opposing forces. The reality is not many things in our lives actually are binary choices. With a ranked-choice voting system, you can vote for a candidate who maybe doesn’t have a chance, but you are not throwing away your vote.”

CARCASSON: “A lot of people might not vote for the person they would love to have the job, because they’re thinking; ‘You know what? They’re not going to get it. So, I’m kind of throwing away my vote, right?’ What ranked-choice voting allows you to do is to actually vote for your preferred candidate, so then you still get to express your perspective. Part of the problem (also) is if you have several people running that are similar, they all split the vote so much that someone else could win that’s not generally supported by the community.”

HOUGHTELING: “Let’s use, I think it was 2004, as an example. The winning candidate for mayor (in Fort Collins) had, like, 28% of the vote, and there were six candidates. That tells me that roughly 72% of the town voted for candidates that didn’t win. That doesn’t sound representative to me. In this case, with ranked-choice voting, the lower candidates’ votes would have been reallocated.”

HOUGHTELING: “In traditional elections, if somebody tells you they’re not voting for you, you just walk away. In this case, if you are not their first choice, you as a candidate want to be their second or third choice. So candidates are going to be trying to find common ground with a much larger swath of the electorate. It’s not just us versus them. It is a slightly different dynamic. Folks who have been proponents of ranked-choice voting have said that it will increase civility and things like that. We’ll get to see if that’s the case.”

CARCASSON: “The focus of my work is communication, and how we have better conversations. I feel that ranked-choice voting kind-of helps with that. Say, if I’m a candidate and I’m canvassing, going door-to-door, and I see someone has a sign of one of my opponents on their lawn. Well, generally, I would skip that house, right? With ranked-choice voting, I still might knock on their door. So it opens up conversation. A typical kind of election doesn’t really reward that. If anyone can vote for you and have you in their ranking, there’s reasons for you to talk to people that might disagree with you, to hear them out, and for them to hear your perspective, which can ultimately make a difference in the election.”

CARCASSON: “Primarily, it’s confusing, and a lot to expect voters to do a lot of research and understand the process and so forth. It’s a little bit complicated. But in terms of what people are doing, it’s not that complicated. You’re ranking your top five, your top choices, however many they are. If there’s not a majority, it triggers the mechanism to do an automatic runoff. One of the cons that’s mentioned is that some people’s votes will get invalidated, because if you only voted for one person or two people, and those two people drop off before majority, your ballot doesn’t count, they say. But, I say it does count, because it counted in the first round; it counted in the second round. It’s just that your preferred candidate didn’t make it to those rounds.”

Scott Reif is a senior student of CSU’s Journalism & Media Communications program minoring in Music Business. He also works as a videographer and production assistant for Barnfly Productions, led by Emmy-award-winner John Barnhardt.