Voter Understanding and Support
Voter Support and Understanding of RCV
It is absolutely crucial that voters understand how to interact with a ranked ballot, understand their electoral system, and are able to cast a meaningful vote for a candidate of their choice. This section examines how well voters understand RCV and voters’ level of satisfaction with RCV.
Voter Support for RCV
- In 2021, 77% of voters surveyed by Rank the Vote NYC in the New York City primaries supported using RCV for future local elections.
- Maine used RCV for the first time for statewide elections in 2018. An exit poll after their November 2018 general election showed 60.9% of respondents in favor of keeping RCV or expanding use of RCV.
- 94% of Santa Fe voters reported feeling “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their first use of RCV in 2018, as reported in an 2018 exit poll by FairVote New Mexico.
- In Minneapolis in 2017, 66% of voters reported support for continued use of RCV, compared with only 16 percent who said they do not support its use and 18 percent who were unsure.
- Find additional details from exit surveys in the following report:
FairVote. 2020. Exit Surveys: Voters Evaluate Ranked Choice Voting.
- RCV may be an acquired taste, according to two 2021 survey experiments (here and here). Researchers found that most survey respondents said they prefer single-choice voting to RCV, but one study also found that those who have used RCV are more positive towards it, suggesting the presence of a status quo bias. The findings underscore the benefits of a voter education initiative with RCV, because voters in real-world RCV elections report that they like RCV and prefer it over their prior voting method, even after using RCV just one time.
Public Perceptions of Alternative Voting Systems: Results from a National Survey Experiment, by David Kimball and Joseph Anthony. (April 2021).
Choosing to Vote as Usual by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi. (February 2021).
- Multiparty proportional or ranked-choice systems can offer the benefits of a small winner-loser gap and an absence of interparty animosity, according to a 2021 study based on a large-scale behavioral game. The study finds that certain institutions, namely those based on proportional representation and RCV, as well as multiparty arrangements, decrease “perceived legitimacy gap”, meaning election winners and losers are in closer agreement that the election is legitimate.
Electoral Systems and Political Attitudes: Experimental Evidence by Sean Fischer, Amber Lee, and Yphtach Lelkes. (May 2021).
Voter Understanding of RCV
A voter's understanding of the voting method is an important component of voter empowerment. This section primarily focuses on self-reported understanding through polling. For research on how voters interact with the ranked ballot in practice, such as data on undervotes, overvotes, and number of rankings used, see the page on Data on RCV -> Ballot Use.
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A 2021 analysis by the R Street Institute found that Maine voters successfully embraced RCV and were not confused by the ballot. Highlights include:
- Voters largely took advantage of the opportunity to rank candidates.
- The proportions of blank ballots in RCV elections are essentially identical to those in Maine's prior non-RCV election.
- Many voters used RCV to cross party lines with their multiple rankings.
Germer, Matt. September 2021. An Analysis of Ranked Choice Voting in Maine. The R Street Institute.
- 95% of voters surveyed by Rank the Vote NYC in the New York City's 2021 primary elections found the ballot "simple to complete". These results were consistent across every ethnic group. 78% said they understood Ranked Choice Voting "extremely" or "very well".
- Over 90% of Maine voters reported that their experience using RCV was either “excellent” or “good”. This poll was an online survey conducted by the League of Women Voters after the June 2018 primary elections, which was the first time most respondents had used RCV.
- Santa Fe voters overwhelmingly reported they were not confused by their ballot after their first RCV election. More than 67% of respondents said the ballot was not at all confusing.
- Voters in Minneapolis have been using RCV since 2009 and continue to report positive results. 92% of respondents said they find voting with RCV “simple”.
- Two cities in Utah used ranked choice voting for city council races for the first time in 2019. Voters overwhelmingly utilized the option to rank candidates, even in their first use of RCV. A majority of voters in both Payson and Vineyard fully ranked their ballots.
- As part of the surveys conducted by the Eagleton Poll in 2013-2014, likely voters in cities using RCV were asked, "When you voted in the recent election, how easy was it to understand the voting instructions?”. In these two surveys, 90% and 89% of respondents say they found the RCV ballot easy to understand. This level of understanding remained high across demographic and socioeconomic groups.
John, S. & Tolbert, C. April 2015. Socioeconomic and Demographic Perspectives on Ranked Choice Voting in the Bay Area.
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In the 2014 Eagleton Poll in California, self-reported understanding of RCV compares favorably to understanding of plurality and the top-two primary.
- The percentage of voters in RCV cities who understood RCV at least “somewhat well” (84%) was roughly equivalent to the percent of voters in plurality cities who understood plurality (83%).
- More respondents (49%) in RCV cities reported understanding RCV extremely or very well than reported understanding the top-two primary extremely or very well (40%).
John, S. & Tolbert, C. April 2015. Socioeconomic and Demographic Perspectives on Ranked Choice Voting in the Bay Area.
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A 2019 study by Todd Donovan, Caroline Tolbert, and Kellen Gracey analyzed survey data to examine whether there are racial disparities in voter understanding.
- In terms of understanding voting instructions for RCV, there were “no differences… between whites and people of color.”
- There were “no differences in RCV cities in how whites, African Americans, and Latinx respondents reported understanding” the system.
- Read FairVote’s highlights here or find the full study at:
Donovan, T., Tolbert, C., & Gracey, K. April 2019. Self‐Reported Understanding of Ranked‐Choice Voting.
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A 2021 study by Joseph Coll of the University of Iowa compared survey data on voters' self-reported understanding to the way they filled out a sample ballot.
- Older voters reported slightly increased difficulty with the ranked ballot, but also were less likely to leave blank rankings when filling out a ballot.
- No other demographic groups consistently experienced systematic differences in ranking difficulty or under‐voting across a series of model specifications.
- The findings support previous evidence of older voters reporting difficulty, but challenge research which assumes difficulty leads to under-voting, and that racial and ethnic groups are disadvantaged by RCV.
- In particular, the study measures which voters chose not to rank all candidates, also sometimes known as voluntary abstention.
- No significant relationships were found when comparing racial and ethnic groups, and only weak evidence linking socioeconomic status to blank rankings.
- The author concludes that the evidence suggests blank rankings on a ballot may be a choice rather than evidence of difficulty casting a ballot.
Coll, Joseph A. June 2021. Demographic Disparities Using Ranked Choice Voting? Ranking Difficulty, Under-Voting, and the 2020 Democratic Primary.
Further reading:
- Andrew Douglas explores the findings from the 2013 survey in Ranked Choice Voting and Civility: New Evidence from American Cities.
- Professor Caroline J. Tolbert examines voter experiences in the 2013 election season in Tolbert, Caroline J. Experiments in Election Reform: Voter Perceptions of Campaigns Under Ranked Choice Voting vs. Plurality Voting. Paper prepared for the Workshop on Electoral Systems, Electoral Reform, and Implications for Democratic Performance. Stanford University, March 14-15, 2014.
