Ranked-Choice Voting Meets a Pre-Emptive Demise in Georgia – But Why?
Since their recent implementation in Maine, Nevada, and Alaska, ranked-choice voting systems have dramatically shifted the outcomes of several major elections. In Alaska, former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) lost in a 2022 special election after splitting votes with other Republican candidates. In Maine, former Representative Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) lost his 2018 race, despite receiving the most first-place votes. Following this, Georgia Republicans have moved to prevent the implementation of ranked-choice elections with Senate Bill 355, which passed the State Senate on Jan. 26 31-19, a sufficient majority to move the vote to the State House.
The ranked-choice system has been praised for its efficiency, as it saves time and resources for both voters and governments. This is the opposite of Georgia’s current runoff election system, which requires voters to return to the polls to choose from the top two vote-receivers. The current system has been reprimanded for its additional expectations from voters and candidates to campaign and vote in a second election. Runoffs also burden the state, which has to expend resources on administration and counting.
Each state’s implementation of ranked-choice voting is slightly different. Across the board, each system has voters rank their candidates in order of their preference, regardless of the candidate's party identification. All major statewide ranked-choice programs utilize IRV, or instant runoff voting. In this system, if one candidate has a simple majority following the first round, there’s no need to hold another election. If no candidate reaches this threshold, the last-ranked candidate is eliminated and vote counters automatically tally the next-ranked picks from the ballots originally favoring the now-eliminated last-place candidate. This process repeats until one candidate has a simple majority and is elected into office. In some localities that seek to fill multiple seats on a legislative body, single transferable voting systems or proportional ranked-choice voting can also be used, but neither has been used at a federal level or in Georgia currently. What varies by state within instant runoff voting is which races utilize ranked-choice, as well as how many candidates voters are able to rank. For example, for congressional, gubernatorial, state executive official, and state legislative elections in Nevada, top-five primaries are utilized. This style begins with an open, partyless primary that decides the top five candidates in the election, by raw vote total. Then, ranked-choice is implemented in the general election where voters rank their choices one through five. Alaska uses a virtually identical system, instead with primaries ranking their top four candidates rather than five. Maine is slightly more open, with voters being permitted to simply rank as many candidates as they wish, with the process repeating until there is a candidate above the 50% threshold.
Presently in Georgia, if no candidate receives a simple majority of the vote share, the top two candidates in the first round face off in another election several weeks later. Even if a candidate receives the most votes on election day, if they don’t receive an absolute majority, they can still lose, as David Perdue did to Jon Ossoff in the 2020 Senate race and subsequent 2021 runoff, despite earning more votes in the first round. This is a direct mirror to the complaints expressed by the RNC and Maine’s Bruce Poliquin, after his loss in 2018, in which the candidate initially receiving the most first-place votes did not win the race.
The runoff and ranked-choice systems have advantages and drawbacks in terms of efficiency and representation, but, in the U.S. context, neither seems to inherently favor a certain party. In fact, in the last two Georgia runoffs, Democrats overperformed in the second round when compared to the first election and have won every available federal runoff since 2014. So why is the Georgia State Legislature so eager to keep the current system and eliminate ranked-choice voting?
The largest problem currently faced by ranked-choice voting is its mainstream Republican opposition. Many opponents of the system have lambasted it for being confusing for voters. The sponsor of SB 355, State Senator Randy Robertson (R-GA), compared a ranked-choice ballot to a misleading lottery ticket. Georgia would not be the first state to proactively ban ranked-choice voting, as Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota have already passed legislation preventing the use of ranked-choice voting statewide. All of these bans, except for Florida’s, were justified on the grounds of the system being overly convoluted; many proponents expressed concerns that the first-place vote receiver would still have a chance to lose.
Given the existing momentum, it would be logical to assume that a bill of this nature was on the horizon for Georgia, considering it is a Republican-majority state whose legislature has already aligned with RNC priorities on other issues, including abortion and weapons regulations. Yet, this specific issue doesn’t make as much sense in a state like Georgia as legislators may make it seem.
An interesting component of SB 355 is that it does not ban ranked-choice voting for absentee voters abroad, allowing them to not have to send in a second ballot during a runoff. This suggests that legislators don’t think the system is too complicated, otherwise, they would ban it outright, especially for those who aren’t in the state and cannot be educated on how the system works. Given this, the question remains – what is the real reason for such widespread Republican opposition to ranked-choice voting?
The answer could be turnout. Ranked-choice voting has been shown to increase youth turnout, whereas overall turnout is consistently lower in second-time-around elections. Yet youth turnout, which is disproportionately Democrat-leaning, was greater than ever before in the 2022 Georgia runoff and has been considered to have directly decided the victor of the election. Thus, it would be logical to assume that a system more accessible to a younger voting population would not be advantageous to the modern Republican Party, especially considering how overwhelmingly left-leaning that age group is.
The other, more likely, answer is much simpler. When Democrats win in ranked-choice elections, whether due to the benefits it has for youth turnout or not, Republicans don’t like it and make a deliberate effort to stop the system itself. John Pudner, president of the conservative organization Take Back Our Republic Action, claimed “the assumption is that if the other side is doing something, it’s probably bad for you.” While he does not speak for the entire Republican party, the attitude towards progress on the issue is clear, angling towards preventing further implementation.
Whatever the motive is, Georgia’s new bill has indicated that the future for ranked-choice voting in America may be dire. The Georgia ban is not an isolated effort, but rather a continuation of a campaign started in 2023 by the RNC, which has outwardly denounced ranked-choice voting. Whether fueled by resistance to change or concerns about turnout, it is clear that there is a coordinated effort to stop ranked-choice voting, and it’s working.
Although there is reason for concern, the future of ranked-choice voting is not a lost cause. Petitions for ballot initiatives are catching traction in states such as Idaho and Colorado and have already passed in Nevada and Oregon. As progressive lawmakers continue to innovate ranked-choice voting and Republicans try to preemptively block it, one notion is undoubtedly clear – this is still a partisan issue likely to be hotly debated for years, in Georgia and across the country.