Ranked-Choice Voting: The Century-Old Electoral Idea Making an Important Comeback

The best pizza place in Waltham and the winner of an election have something uncomfortable in common: the winner may not be the choice preferred by most people. Ask a group of residents for their favorite pizza place and there is a good chance of receiving a wide range of answers. A traditional vote could easily produce a winner that most people did not actually prefer if several similar choices divide support among themselves. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) approaches this problem differently: voters rank their choices, the lowest-performing options are eliminated, and their votes are transferred to each voter's next preference until one option receives majority support. Most people would likely consider this a reasonable way to settle a disagreement over pizza. Applied to elections, however, the same concept has become part of a much larger discussion over representation, majority rule, and the mechanics of democratic choice.

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) has emerged repeatedly throughout modern electoral history as voters and policymakers have confronted these same questions. In 2020, those questions reached Waltham, where a majority of voters and 11 of the city’s 18 precincts supported RCV as part of a statewide ballot question, although the measure did not pass statewide. Waltham's vote reflected a broader interest in changing the way elections are conducted. Understanding that interest requires looking beyond recent ballot initiatives to the longer history of a voting system that has repeatedly emerged in response to the limitations of plurality elections.

The Origins of RCV

The intellectual foundations of RCV originated in nineteenth-century Britain. During the 1850s, political thinkers began searching for alternatives to winner-take-all elections that often left substantial portions of the electorate without meaningful representation. Among the most influential was the English lawyer Thomas Hare, whose 1859 proposal for proportional representation introduced the idea of single transferable vote (STV), in which candidates were ranked by preference. The philosopher John Stuart Mill later endorsed Hare's STV proposal, arguing that representative institutions functioned best when they reflected the diversity of public opinion rather than simply the preferences of the largest political faction. While Hare's original proposal focused on proportional representation, William Robert Ware, an American architect and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later demonstrated that STV could also be adapted for single-winner elections. In 1871, he applied the method to the election of the Board of Overseers at Harvard College. Hare’s principle of ranking candidates thus became the basis for both proportional and single-winner ranked-choice systems, sometimes called instant-runoff voting.

Since then, many countries and jurisdictions have adopted RCV to conduct elections. Australia became the first country to adopt the system for national elections, introducing preferential voting (as RCV is known in Australia) for elections to the House of Representatives in 1918 after several contests demonstrated the problems created when multiple candidates divided the vote. Under a plurality system, a candidate could win despite receiving support from less than half of voters if competing candidates split the remaining ballots. RCV addressed this issue by allowing voters to express additional preferences without requiring a separate runoff election. If no candidate received a majority of first-choice votes, lower-performing candidates were eliminated and ballots redistributed according to voters' next preferences until one candidate secured majority support. Similar systems were later adopted for national elections in Ireland (1919) and Malta (1921), as well as for local and regional elections in other countries, each adapting RCV to its own political circumstances and institutions.

RCV in the US

American cities first adopted RCV during the early twentieth-century reform movement, when reformers sought to reduce corruption and weaken the influence of political machines. Reformers viewed the existing electoral system as one that entrenched party machines and discouraged support for independent or minority candidates. Between 1915 and 1936, two dozen American cities, including Cleveland, Cincinnati, and New York, adopted versions of the system. Supporters argued that RCV could encourage broader representation, reduce the power of established political organizations, and allow voters to support candidates outside traditional party structures without fear of wasting their votes. Yet the reforms also generated opposition. In many cities, established political interests resisted the changes, and RCV was eventually repealed in most places. By the middle of the twentieth century, the practice had largely disappeared from American elections.

Its decline, however, did not eliminate the concerns that had produced it. Toward the end of the twentieth century, interest in RCV returned as voters and policymakers revisited familiar questions about plurality elections. Candidates increasingly won crowded contests without majority support, runoff elections often required additional time and expense, and voters worried that supporting their preferred candidate could unintentionally help elect their least preferred choice. Supporters argued that ranked-choice voting could reduce these problems by allowing voters to rank multiple candidates while producing winners with broader support. Critics, by contrast, questioned whether ranking candidates made elections more complicated and whether voters would fully understand the process. These competing perspectives continue to shape the modern debate.

The Renewed Growth of RCV

The renewed interest in RCV has produced a gradual expansion across the United States in recent years. As a result, RCV is currently being used or has been adopted for use in upcoming elections in 49 U.S. jurisdictions representing nearly 14 million voters across 22 states and Washington, D.C. Cities including San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York have adopted or readopted RCV for municipal elections, while Maine became the first state to use it for statewide federal elections in 2018 and Alaska later adopted its own version for state and federal offices in 2022. Although implementation has varied across jurisdictions, the recent growth of RCV represents a continuation of a much longer historical pattern.

The history of RCV illustrates that changes to electoral systems rarely follow a straight path. Voting systems evolve as societies confront recurring questions about representation, majority rule, and voter choice. RCV has appeared, disappeared, and reappeared over more than a century because it attempts to address enduring challenges within democratic elections. Whether Massachusetts revisits the question in the future remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that RCV is neither a recent invention nor an untested experiment. From nineteenth-century Britain to modern Australia, from early twentieth-century American cities to Waltham's own precincts in 2020, RCV has repeatedly resurfaced whenever voters have sought ways to balance individual choice with majority support.