Rank MI Vote loss was a big deal
by Trent England
After a string of losses in 2024, ranked-choice voting campaigners narrowed their focus to one state for 2026. Their early loss in Michigan should not obscure the significance of their proposal.
The attempt to put RCV into the Michigan Constitution was profoundly dangerous. Experimenting with elections at that scale would upend the democratic process for millions of American voters. It would have made the state’s long ballots even longer, created new ways to make mistakes, and made running elections more difficult for local officials (who strongly opposed Rank MI Vote). Should it have passed, it appears that Michigan would have become the largest single jurisdiction ever to experiment with RCV.
That is not just true within the United States, where RCV is used in two of the smallest states and some cities. While RCV advocates like to talk about the use of their system around the world, only Australia and Ireland have embraced the complex voting scheme, and neither use it on a scale close to that of a Michigan statewide election.
The Commonwealth of Australia has about 18 million registered voters (and voting there is compulsory), but only uses RCV to elect their 150 House of Representatives members, with each House district having around 120,000 voters.
The Republic of Ireland is a much smaller nation, with just 3.6 million registered voters. It actually does use RCV in its national presidential election. The most recent of these was just last year, when 1,656,436 people cast a ballot (46% turnout). Of these, there were 213,738 ballots “spoilt,” leaving 1,442,698 valid ballots.
The State of Michigan has about 7.3 million registered voters from a population of eligible voters just under 8 million. This is more than twice the number of voters as Ireland. In the last statewide election in Michigan, for presidential electors and U.S. Senate in 2024, more than 5.6 million people cast ballots. And each of Michigan’s 38 State Senate districts is larger (with about 192,000 registered voters) than an Australian House district.
Looking around the world offers other lessons. RCV advocates claim their plan raises voter turnout, but the recent Irish election had significantly lower turnout than the United States. They blame our election process for voter frustration, but Pew Research has found similar concerns increasing in many nations that use different electoral systems. In Ireland, thousands of voters intentionally invalidated their ballots in the last election—an election using RCV.