Ranked Choice Voting: What Happened & What’s Next

From FairVote's CEO and Senior Legal Fellow

Editor’s note: 2024 was a “yikes!” election cycle for electoral reform. That made me extra curious to hear how FairVote CEO Meredith Sumpter and senior legal fellow G. Michael Parsons were thinking about the path forward.

For those reading the tea leaves and trying to discern where the electoral reform movement should go from here, this piece is a treasure trove.

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On November 5, 2024, ranked choice voting was on the ballot across six states and five cities, including the nation’s capital of Washington, DC. 

RCV has built an impressive track record over the past ten years, and the measures on the ballot this year offered the hope of extending that winning streak even further. In 2016, only two million Americans lived in the 10 cities using RCV. As of today, that number has grown to nearly 17 million Americans in over 50 cities, counties, and states. The number has grown because the reform works, giving voters greater say and incentivizing elected officials to get things done for their constituents. 

On Election Day, the number grew yet again, but we also fell far short of what we had hoped. RCV won majority support in every city where it was on the ballot, including a resounding 73% win in Washington, D.C. – even sweeping every single precinct. Well over 3 million Americans voted for RCV ballot measures. But statewide measures in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon fell in a polarized election year where voters bypassed nearly all non-partisan political reform measures.  

Any organization working to advance meaningful reforms will eventually face losses, particularly with an increasingly well-organized national opposition and pushback from entrenched state and local interests. But that doesn’t mean you pack up and go home. On the contrary, the deep problems in our democracy that RCV can help solve remain: Voters are see-sawing from one party to another, looking for an answer amid their overall frustration and feeling that politicians don’t care about people like them.  

Despite the status quo winning this cycle, RCV remains on an impressive growth trajectory and is liked by voters wherever it is used. With toxic politics continuing to spread in this country, the promise of RCV for building a more representative and more functional democracy remains as vital as ever. 

As might be expected, some long-standing critics of RCV have seized on the state-level losses and are offering a typical post-election analysis: “Why the results prove I was right all along.”

But there’s a difference between hot takes and hard work. And it’s difficult to imagine any major election reform that would have sailed to victory this year. There were numerous election reforms on the ballot in addition to ranked choice voting – including independent redistricting commissions and open primaries. All have won statewide victories in recent years. This cycle, all of them failed at the statewide level.

These are painful results but also important learning opportunities – the kind that only come to those out on the field making gains. So don’t worry about the armchair quarterbacks. For the reformers and everyday Americans putting in the work to build a better democracy, it's only halftime. And the hard-fought lessons of this election cycle, along with the multi-state exposure to ranked choice voting provided by the November ballot measures, will provide a stronger foundation for future progress.

So what does it all mean?  As we recoup and regroup, here are four reflections on the election and its lessons for the path forward.

There is no “one simple explanation” for why any statewide measure failed – but the electoral context matters.

No single cause or answer explains this year’s election results. At best, each answer shared in the immediate aftermath of an election cycle offers only a partial insight. At worst, each oversimplified explanation risks making warring factions out of critical reform partners.   

No single answer explains the results. Did open primaries weigh down RCV? That doesn’t explain Oregon. Did RCV weigh down open primaries? That doesn’t explain Montana or South Dakota. Would leaving the option of a ranked system open to the legislature fare better? That doesn’t explain Arizona. Or how about simply requiring that candidates must win a majority of the vote to be elected? Roughly 60% of voters in Montana said “no.”  

All of these measures did have three things in common: They were on lengthy ballots in an election cycle dominated by the presidential race, in a new environment where a well-organized opposition to RCV has arisen, and at a time of voter exhaustion and skepticism around the country and the globe. New ideas can be less appealing when voters feel like the stakes are high and the world around them is uncertain. With the presidential election looming larger than everything else, voters may have defaulted to a “no” position on the relatively new concept on their ballots.

To be sure, the results still matter and the lessons learned will inform our onward work. But it is equally important not to overread the results of one election. The electoral mood – like the stock market – is hard to forecast. And, like the stock market, it’s better to stay consistently invested over the long run than attempt to predict the ups and downs and sell everything at the slightest turn.  

Rather than seeking to cast blame, we should be reaching out to plan next steps together. And that is exactly the heartening response FairVote is seeing from peers and partners. Rather than losing focus or fortitude, election reform organizations are redoubling their efforts for the work ahead. And so will we.

All paths to proportional representation should remain open – especially the one that’s working.

FairVote believes that proportional representation is the north star for transforming our broken politics and moving beyond the toxic “us versus them” divide. That is why FairVote was founded and began building the case for both single-winner and multi-winner RCV over 30 years ago.     

Since Election Day, some critics have argued that the results show RCV is “too incremental” to inspire change – and that continued efforts to advance RCV do not offer “a winning path” to transformative reforms like proportional representation.  

But the single-winner version of RCV is transformative in its own right, and the multi-winner version of RCV is the only form of proportional representation that has ever been adopted in the United States to date. Adopting RCV as a pathway to proportional representation is more than a “theory of change” – it is a proven roadmap that is already winning across the country. Even in this difficult election cycle, multi-winner RCV continued to gain ground, with 79% of voters in Oak Park, IL adopting proportional RCV, and nearly 73% of voters in Washington, DC, adopting a semi-proportional version of RCV for some seats. 

Proportional RCV has been used for decades in Cambridge, MA; Arden, DE; and Minneapolis, MN. In more recent years, proportional RCV has been adopted and used in Portland, OR (for the first time this November); Arlington, VA; and Albany, CA. In 2025, proportional RCV will be used for the first time in Portland, ME, and Charlottesville, VA. And proportional RCV measures have already been passed in eight other cities across Massachusetts and Michigan, pending state authorization.  

Proportional RCV also remains the only form of proportional representation compatible with nonpartisan elections – which comprise roughly 70% of all local elections (and 85% of all city elections) in the United States. In other words, proportional RCV is the only path to proportionality in the vast majority of American elections – including as a remedy in the vast majority of potential voting rights cases. 

We can also look to the promising performance of proportional RCV in its first-ever use in Portland, Oregon – delivering a truly representative city council in what is now the largest American city to adopt PR. The Oregonian notes an equal number of winners from the “most left-leaning contingent” and “pro-business” flanks. The newly elected council also ranges in age from 28 to 70, and appears to be half female and nearly half people of color (proportional to the number of the city’s non-White residents). These are the ideals of our democratic republic – an election and governance system that is responsive to voters, reflecting who they are and what they want for their city. 

Local adoptions also reveal an overlooked reform dynamic: RCV is often how people learn about proportional representation in the first place. Local advocates who want to bring RCV to their city or town realize they have multi-winner elections and approach FairVote to learn “how to do multi-winner RCV.”  These are not activists trying to pass proportional representation who end up settling for single-winner RCV instead; these are advocates trying to pass single-winner RCV who come to learn about and embrace proportional RCV.

That’s not to say that proportional RCV is the only form of proportional representation that could ever be adopted in the United States. FairVote would be delighted to see other proportional reforms succeed for those partisan elections where alternative policy options remain available. But for PR to spread far and wide across the nation, all pathways to PR must remain open – especially through RCV, the only path that has seen success to date.

Big changes require trusted conversations.

Our initial learning from the 2024 election suggests that new election reforms may demand more voter engagement than other types of ballot measures. An initiative to raise the minimum wage is already familiar to most voters. The core task of such a campaign is to persuade and mobilize.  

Major electoral reforms, on the other hand, require voter education first. That is not to say electoral reforms are “confusing” – just that they are new.  From our experience canvassing across the country these past weeks, too many voters still went to the polls not knowing what these reforms were and what they could do for our politics and voter power. Unfortunately, voters almost always vote "no" if they're unsure about a ballot measure – particularly if they’re sorting through a plethora of initiatives, as was the case in Colorado (14 statewide ballot measures), Nevada (7 statewide ballot measures), and Oregon (5 statewide ballot measures). 

This does not appear to be a gap that advertising alone can easily fill – especially in a year with endless campaign commercials and voters who became practiced in the art of tuning it out. Changes to our elections that might seem overdue coming from a local advocate or trusted source might seem abstract or unnecessary coming from a 30-second commercial.  

At polling places, we found that even a quick chat with voters could often move them from unaware of a measure to enthusiastically supportive. This kind of personal engagement also helps explain the continued, consistent support for RCV measures at the local level even in a challenging electoral environment for statewide reforms.  

To be sure, more trusted and personalized voter outreach takes time and effort to scale. But we know that RCV can win at the state level because it already has. And local adoptions can continue to provide a source of inspiration, learning, and foundation-building ahead of statewide efforts in the future – notably, for example, the statewide Oregon RCV measure performed best in Multnomah County and Benton County, the two areas in the state where ranked choice voting is already used at the municipal level.  

In short, statewide campaigns for structural reforms to our elections require support that is both broad and locally trusted. And this brings us to the final key lesson in this set of takeaways.  

Structural reform will be won by a coalition or not at all. 

Many organizations in the voting rights and election reform spaces are still reeling from the election. But even more challenging times lie ahead. And to earn voters’ trust, they will require us to turn to each other, not on each other.

The need for reform is stronger than ever. We need to take the temperature down, find new ways to build bridges across differences, and give voters the choices and agency that they demand and deserve. 

All of this can be done in ways that lift up the role that parties can and should play in our politics, bringing major and minor parties alike along in coalition rather than opposition. All of this can be done in ways that move proportional representation and the structural protection of voting rights to the center of the conversation, defending and advancing the power of communities of color to elect candidates of their choice. And all of this can be done in ways that incorporate and reap the benefits of fusion voting, without the risks of vote-splitting and non-majoritarian outcomes that come from adopting fusion alone.

In the end, winning coalitions and winning reforms are built together. This process requires flexibility and humility – holding space for disagreement and compromise to build a broader community behind the final product. All of this aligns with FairVote’s onward strategic plan to play a supporting role in the reform ecosystem. 

This turn in our strategy and approach comes at a crucial juncture for the movement and for our country. Now is the time to step back, find partners, and work together as never before.

Only through deep coalition-building can advocates hope to deliver the kind of trusted engagement that is needed to effect broader structural changes. Only through local activism and local adoption can organizers build the case and the community needed to confidently win statewide measures. And only through outreach and inclusive organizing can we model the kind of change we wish to see in our politics and in our elections. 

To be sure, all of this takes time – and the cause of reform is urgent. But as the proverb goes: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is now. Reforms will not come faster just because we want them to or need them to. 

Coalition work is the best way forward, and it’s the only way forward.

What’s next?

What does this mean in terms of next steps?  

In light of the above, that's a conversation FairVote is having with new partners and old friends. We know that many in the election reform movement are undertaking thorough after-action analyses and reports on what worked – and what didn’t – this election cycle. We look forward to learning from those efforts (and contributing our own) in the coming months. Listening openly, planning collectively, and organizing effectively with coalition partners will be key as the election reform movement discerns its onward path.

We are confident that ranked choice voting will continue to grow in the years ahead because it works in delivering more representative and functional elections – and government – to voters. The need for this reform has never been greater.

Meredith Sumpter is the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections.

G. Michael Parsons is senior legal fellow at FairVote.

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