In ten states, a primary runoff election may be held if no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast in their party’s primary. States currently using primary runoffs include Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina (30% threshold), Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota (35% threshold), and Texas. FairVote studied voter turnout in all congressional primary runoffs held since 1994. Below are our key findings. 

Near-Universal Decline in Turnout. Turnout declined between the primary and the runoff in 240 of the 248 regularly scheduled primary runoffs in the U.S House and U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2020. In other words, in 97% of primary runoff elections fewer people voted in the second round than in the first. The average decline in turnout was 38% and the median decline was 37%. 

Primary-Runoff Timing a Key Factor. The longer the wait between the initial primary and the runoff, the higher the decrease in voter turnout between elections. Runoffs held between 31 and 40 days after the initial primary have a median turnout decline over three times higher than that of runoffs held between 11 and 20 days after the initial primary. 

Runoffs Nominate Winning Candidates for the General Election. Of the 248 runoffs in this time period, 79 (32%) resulted in a primary winner who trailed in the first round. Forty-one of these went on to win the general election. These congresspeople had the broadest support in their districts, but would not have been elected to Congress under plurality voting. Despite their faults regarding voter turnout decline, runoffs aim to achieve an important goal: avoiding unrepresentative winners who do not have majority support.

A spreadsheet with the raw data can be found here.

FairVote’s Monopoly Politics is a biennial project conducted before each election cycle to predict the results of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. First developed in 1997 as a forerunner to the Cook Partisan Voting Index and later refined to systematize its weighting of incumbency, Monopoly Politics’ influential methodology relies solely on prior voting patterns to make its predictions, rather than polling data and other inputs that capture more transitory changes in the political landscape. Based on its predictive success, this methodology is sound: Monopoly Politics’ highest confidence projections were over 99% accurate for five of the last six election cycles. 

The key takeaway from Monopoly Politics 2020 is that nearly every election is reinforcing our original insight that partisanship is becoming the primary determinant of electoral outcomes. As the incumbency bump falls and crossover representatives grow rarer, voters are gradually falling back into patterns of local partisanship to elect their representatives, regardless of political experience or name recognition. The result is a polarized system where candidates are rewarded for adopting hyper-partisan platforms, particularly in hyper-partisan districts, instead of championing inclusive policies and bipartisan compromise that benefit all. 

The ability to handle a recount of votes to ensure fair, accurate and genuinely democratic outcomes is widely recognized as a critical component of election administration. Trust in elections requires trust in the recount process and ongoing learning about how best to conduct recounts and determine what victory margins and post-elections audit results should trigger a recount.

This report examines 20 years of statewide election recounts and finds that recounts which change the outcome of an election are exceedingly rare and require very narrow margins of victory. The report includes FairVote's recommendations for state recount laws and post-election audit procedures.

Maine held its second cycle of primary elections using ranked choice voting (RCV) in July 2020. Nine state and federal races used RCV, including the hotly-contested Republican primary for the second congressional district, for which FairVote conducted RCV polling prior to the election.

This report examines the election results based on ballot data. Each of the RCV races had high turnout, strong use of rankings by voters, and low ballot error. In addition, the report compares our poll findings with election results, demonstrating that RCV polling is reliable and accurate.

Five state Democratic parties used ranked choice voting (RCV) in presidential primary elections and caucuses in 2020 with great success. Despite a global pandemic, all five states had high rates of success with RCV and, especially in the four states where all voters used RCV, secured accurate and comprehensive election results.

This report examines the results from those states based on ballot data. Results show that voters overwhelmingly took advantage of the option to rank candidates on the ballot, made very few errors, and turned out in large numbers. In a year when millions of early voters in states without RCV cast ballots for presidential candidates who had withdrawn by the time they were counted, RCV made more votes count.

In this analysis, Pamela Keller makes the case for the constitutionality of the The Fair Representation Act (FRA, H.R. 4000). The FRA would require every state to elect Congressional representatives through a form of ranked choice voting known as the “single transferable vote”, use multi-winner rather than single-winner districts, and adopt independent redistricting commissions to draw the new multi-winner districts. 

As the name suggests, the FRA aims to create a more fair system for all states and is a constitutional and necessary regulation of federal elections by Congress that will bring about a new era of proportional representation to match the dynamic and developing opinions and identities of our nation.

In this short analysis, we attempt to estimate the number of voters utterly locked out of representation: those who prefer one party but live in a district that is safe for the opposite party. We do so using the partisanship metric from Monopoly Politics along with estimates of eligible voter populations from the United States census. We find that approximately 70 million eligible voters are in that very situation. In a political system that prioritizes geography over all else, the only representative they can call "theirs" goes into Congress to vote against their political interests. This is a severe weakness of our winner-take-all system for electing Congress, one that is largely corrected by the adoption of a multi-winner fair representation system.

The movement for ranked choice voting (RCV) has seen a number of successes over the past few years. One of the greatest examples comes from the state of Maine. While well worth the fight, Maine’s transition to RCV required repeated struggles by the state’s voters against numerous challenges, both legislative and in court. The tumult led one court to claim, “[t]he history of ranked-choice voting in Maine to date could provide the substance of an entire civics course on the creation of statutory law in the State of Maine.” This report follows the story of the implementation and use of RCV in Maine with the aim of highlighting instructive examples of wins and setbacks to serve as a roadmap for RCV advocates across the country.

Primary runoff elections are held after an initial election when no candidate surpasses a predetermined vote threshold (typically 50%, although lower in some states). In a runoff, the top two vote recipients from the initial round compete, and the candidate who receives the most votes in the runoff becomes the party’s nominee.

Runoffs increase the likelihood that a party’s nominee is representative of the party’s primary voters. They also give voters in the first round an enhanced ability to express their preferences without “wasting” their votes on a candidate whom they prefer, but who has little chance of winning. In a runoff system, voters can vote for the candidate they most strongly support in the first election. If that candidate advances to the runoff, the voters can back them again. If that candidate does not advance to the runoff, voters can then express their preference for whichever of the top two candidates they prefer.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of runoff elections is the decrease in voter turnout for the runoff stage of the primary. Decreased turnout dilutes the main benefit of a runoff: improving representation by allowing voters in primaries to select a candidate with broad popular support. In the United States, primary runoff turnout rates often plunge so low that the democratic legitimacy of the elections is cast into doubt.

In the coming months, U.S. Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia plans to reintroduce the Fair Representation Act, reviving the bold new vision for congressional elections originally put forth in his 2017 legislation by the same name.

Multi-member congressional districts with ranked choice voting remain new ideas to many, but the proposals are increasingly gaining traction among elected officials and news media, including the editorial board of The New York Times. Moreover, the idea is not a new one. Each element drew upon a rich history of local, state, and federal approaches to elections. Finally, its approach was consistent with centuries of congressional action to address problems in federal elections

In this white paper, we show how that history evolved since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, along with how progress has stalled since 1967. With the dysfunction of the current system more apparent each election cycle, the time has come to revisit how we elect the "People's House."