Denver residents, don’t let ranked choice voting ruin your ballot

Candidates sit on stage during a Denver mayoral debate at McAuliffe International School on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, in Denver. Organizers limited attendance to 11 candidates. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

Imagine someone being sworn in as mayor of Denver after being declared the winner with only 20% of the vote – just one in five voters.

Unlikely? Not so fast. If the electoral method called ranked-choice voting, now being sold to an uncaring electorate, were to become law, voters would have to say goodbye once and for all to the City Charter’s guarantee that Denver’s mayor must win by a majority of the vote.

That’s true. When the City Council rejected a proposal for a ranked-choice voting system to replace our runoff elections three years ago, the bill included a section that repealed the long-standing requirement that the mayor, county council members, city auditor, and clerk and recorder be elected by a majority.

That’s because ranked voting rarely produces a majority winner.

Why? Isn’t the ranking of votes a kind of ‘direct second round’, which would replace our 72-year tradition of guaranteeing a majority result by means of a second round?

No, it is a confusing and opaque way to return to the old system of polyphony, where whoever gets the most votes wins, regardless of the percentage.

In ranked choice voting, ballots are set aside when there are second, third, or more rounds of counting, and those voters do not elect any of the remaining candidates. The ranked choice system calls them “exhausted ballots,” as if the voter simply got tired and left. By removing their ballots from the denominator when calculating the 50% threshold, ranked choice promoters can falsely claim that it will result in a majority winner. The “exhausted” voters might as well have stayed home.

This happens more often than you think.

In my analysis of 51 elections across the country decided by ranked choice, only eight “winners” had a true majority of the votes cast. But of those eight mayoral elections decided by ranked choice in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and New York, none resulted in a true majority winner. Even incumbent mayors failed to win a true majority.

The worst choice was in San Francisco, where a candidate for a seat on the Board of Supervisors—their version of the city council—was declared the winner with 52 percent of the vote. But that was after a whopping 60 percent of the ballots had been “exhausted” after 20 rounds of counting the voters’ ranked ballots. In reality, she got only 21 percent of the vote.

It’s easy to claim you have a majority, when ranked choice allows you to ignore three out of the five people who went to the polls and voted. Why would Denver want to do this?