Ranked-choice voting and ballot exhaustion

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is often described as complicated, and for good reason. If a candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, it works like any other election. Otherwise, tabulation goes into multi-round elimination, where the least popular candidate is dropped, and rankings are redistributed to the remaining candidates.  (Here is a detailed explanation.) This process continues until one candidate receives a majority. 

Under this system, voters are expected to rank candidates in order of preference. This encourages candidates with little chance of winning to run, resulting in longer ballots, which can lead to longer lines at the poll and more mistakes. Sometimes out of confusion, voters fail to rank multiple candidates, and when any candidates they did rank get eliminated, then their ballots get eliminated as well. That’s called ballot exhaustion. 

To be clear, these voters are left out of the final results of the election. They have gone to the polls or otherwise turned in their ballot. They chose at least one candidate and cast a valid ballot. And yet somewhere in the RCV process, they are excluded by law from being counted in the final results.

An egregious example of this was the 2021 NYC Democratic mayoral primary, when over 140,000 ballots were eliminated and results were delayed by more than a week. This occurred despite the city spending $15 million on voter education ahead of the election.

Since ballot exhaustion seems indefensible to many people, advocates tend to sidestep the issue. But when they do engage, their defense usually comes down to choice. Voters choose how many candidates to rank, and if their ballots get eliminated because they fail to rank enough candidates, then that’s their fault. In their view, voters who refuse to rank additional candidates based on principle as well as voters who fail to rank enough candidates based on confusion deserve to be disenfranchised.

In an election in a city with millions of voters like NYC, this can result in hundreds of thousands of voters being disenfranchised. Multiple studies have shown that elderly and minority voters are more likely to have their ballots eliminated. That’s one reason that civil rights leaders like Hazel Dukes came out against the system in 2021, calling it “voter suppression.”

It's clear ranked-choice voting makes voting harder, election administration harder, and election auditing nearly impossible. But unlike other election systems, it also punishes voters for not voting the “right” way by eliminating their ballots and shutting them out of the process.