RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.
(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn’t update the title text)
As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.
- Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
- West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
- Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
- North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
- Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.
Six states banned RCV in 2024.
Why YSK: If you’re a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don’t allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.
Edit: fixed formatting
Edit 2: Added in the map so you don’t have to click the link:
See the pattern? 🤔
This is democrats and Republicans not wanting people to vote for their candidate of choice because they have to constantly play the game of the lesser of two evils. They wanna keep power
We voted for it at the county level here in CA. That was back in 2020. San Diego county voted to use RCV, as did several other counties in CA. The county registrar of voters is refusing to change from FPTP, and is waiting to see how the lawsuits turn out.
Even if your state hasn’t banned it, they will fight you tooth and nail not to change it.
Golly what a surprise! Duopoly gonna duopoly!
Remember that you still have power in this system by not voting for a party if they do not fulfill your demands.
Ohio is trying to ban it this year.
Mainer here. Its great, except that the governor’s race is specifically exempted from RCV. May have something to do with GOP former governor LePage, but can’t recall before my morning meds…
Sarah huckabee did something awful??? Shocked I say
Seems about right. This reinforces my reality. If something good happened to humanity, I might wonder if I somehow might be going mad.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
We have rcv here for local elections in nyc but not for any state or federal elections
because the state and fed levels are corrupt as hell. the local level seemed more amenable, although i suspect the nyc mayoral elections will be thoroughly fiddled.
At what point is a democracy not a democracy any more?
The US has never been a democracy, they’re just being more straightforward about it recently
People keep commenting this without context and it’s driving me mad. It’s factually wrong, so at least tell us what you mean in the figurative sense.
It is not factually wrong, even if you argue that a representative republic can be democratic it’s an easily verifiable historical fact that ours never was. At every point in US history there have been groups of people who were deliberately and methodically disenfranchised from any representation while still being subject to US rule. If being told that hurts your feelings it just means the propaganda worked, try being less gullible.
No, this is just the first time anyone actually invested more than the one sentence into an explanation. Can you give me a little more to look into? I genuinely have no idea what you’re referring to.
African Americans were supposed to be given the right to vote after abolition.
There was a brief period of time during Reconstruction where that happened. However, many states came up with complicated contrivances to make it impossible to vote - poll taxes, “literacy tests,” etc. Effectively, it was a right solely on paper until LBJ in the 60s. Conservatives throwing a massive fit about this is why we have the insane fascistic Right we do right now - they were pro public education until Black kids got to go to the same kids as white kids.
Women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. Conservatives today are trying to revoke the 19th amendment and undo that.
If I had to guess I’d say that nobody has bothered responding to you with more than a single sentence because you clearly have internet access and could easily read about the history of US voting rights and the current state of US voting suppression, and that you therefore have no excuse for weighing in on a topic about which you clearly don’t know much, but that’s just an educated guess.
Originally voting rights in the US were only extended to white male christian land-owners. Over the course of the next two centuries they gradually relaxed the property ownership requirements, then eventually got around to granting voting rights to non-white men and then women. In theory this would make the US currently a democracy, but in practice they suppress voting access in predominantly non-white districts through gerrymandering, and elected officials routinely act against the wishes of their constituents in favor of pleasing their billionaire donors. We transitioned from a fundamentally racist and classist republic to an oligarchy.
All that to say it is a democracy after all, just even more condescendingly. Wonderful.
No, that’s not what I said at all you fucking moron. The US is not and has never been a democracy, go read a book.
A better question would be “when was there ever been a true democracy?”
For me, there hasn’t been. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. It means that we need to truly internalise that wealth and power will, if left unchecked, succeed in perverting it entirely. We need to be ever augmenting it, with that in mind, with a view to playing whack a mole with the interests of the 1% and keeping it working for the 99%.
I mean that won’t work either. The rich and powerful will never allow us to simply vote away their ill beggoten wealth and power. However, at least people could say that they tried.
The USA is too big to be a democracy. It would need to be several smaller regions/countries that had equal rights when dealing with each other. But its much easier to just force people to do what you want rather than make a mutually beneficial deal.
For the U.S., the decisive blow came with the Citizens United ruling, although it’s not unreasonable to suggest the refusal to punish Nixon during watergate signaled that the rule of law was merely a suggestion. That kicked off a whole cascade of political and legal maneuvering to get both the legislative and societal landscape into such a contortion that it would willingly hand away the entire nation to vulture-capitalists.
- For patriots, politicians and NPCs: As long as there is democracy in the name (Democratic Republic of Korea)
- For decent people: As soon as the laws/choices the government produces are no longer what the average person would choose.
Sadly, some states, people voted against ranked-choice-voting in referendum. Seems lile people just hear a complex idea and want to shut it down because it challenged their simplistic worldview.
Not sure. Ancient societies also used FPTP and they are still considered by some Scholars/Historians as “democracy” 🤷♂️
Personally, I think government systems are actually a type of technology. Unfortunately, they aren’t the kind of research where you can easily experiment and iterate upon, since people tend to die in massive numbers if the experiment fails.
Americans complain about the two party system and do absolutely nothing to change that. It’s like watching a soap opera but everyone’s fell of the horse and lost their memory.
It’s even worse than that - they don’t just “do absolutely nothing to change that”, they actively whip each other into line by loudly blaming third party voters for not giving them the votes that they somehow owe to their big money party.
It’s almost like those in power make the laws that are used to elect those in power 🤔
In Colorado last year RCV was on the ballot as part of an initiative. It was shot down easily because both parties campaigned against it. Not sure what to do when the weight of all incumbents is thrown against something
In Colorado, one of my wife’s friends is what most people (I say this, knowing the Lemmy political scale is vastly different from most Americans) would consider super liberal. She’s also very outspoken and politically active, so she has no problems telling everyone she knows how to vote on every issue.
Last election, we were at her house and she mentioned that she was against ranked choice voting. When I asked her why, she pointed to her voting guide provided by the Colorado Democratic Party. She just blindly accepts that because the party says it’s bad, then it’s bad.
After seeing that, it wasn’t surprising to me when the proposition failed.
Fuck thai boils my blood
Lol go to r/conservative and you’ll see all those idiots having doublethink simultaneouly saying that they support term limits for congress and support for ranked-choice voting, yet continues to vote in conservatives that oppose the very policies they claim to support.
Its actually quite ridiculous. Republican legislators consistantly oppose raising the minimum wage or abortion, yet, the republican voters votes in favor of those policies, while simultaneously vote for the legislators that oppose them.
I’m just like… Why??? Why do y’all vote like this? 🤦♂️
I think we should just go the Swiss-route and do direct democracy; representatives don’t even represent their constituents anymore.
I think we should just go the Swiss-route and do direct democracy;
That’s literally the Anarchy system. I.e Laws and no leaders.
As an Australian who has ranked choice (we call it preferential) it’s not the panecea folks here seem to think it is to bring about the enlightenment.
I’m 58, have voted in every election from when I was eligible through to this year. We don’t have ICE but we have Border Force and we routinely deport non citizens, we inspect digital devices at the border, we off shore legal refugees in internment camps, we have zero care for the enviorment and love penis shaped defence spending, we are a car dependent shit hole with few redeeming qualities… It’s ever been thus, Donad Horne oponed on this in the 1970s.
We don’t have feedom of the press or freedom of speech, so often these things are unable to even be reported on at all and our most egregious atrocities have widespread support amongst the broader population. In that respect its not as big a divisor as. n the US as we’re all arseholes :) We’re happy to allow religious scumbags to discriminate against LGBQT folks, happy to have our privacy removed, are quite fond of fucking over our indigenous peoples and the wider enviorment and near zero concern for exestential issues like climate change. We’re happy to shit over homeless people and have unaffordable housing and racism is broadly endemic.
We have never elected a government that i think is anything but objectively fucking horrible, we have our tongue firmly stuck up the US foreign policy asshole and follow them into every stupid dumb shit military action. We have had the occasionally decent poltican but then so does the US (Bernie etc) .
Like us, your people are broken and you’re not going to cure what ails ya’ with RCV.
I’m just like… Why??? Why do y’all vote like this?
Looks awkwardly at the voting history of every (non-local) politician I have voted for…
Yeah. Those Republicans sure look silly rallying behind people who immediately betray them once in office.
Awkward cough.
This may shock you, but there’s a lot of us. It’s not the same people doing both.
In MO. Voted on it last year. The ballot was intentionally worded to be misleading.
It said each person can only cast one vote. Making it sound like it was to prevent people from voting twice even though that person as already not allowed.
So dumb.
They just pulled that in the Ohio House this week. They have been calling it “One Person, One Vote” and are going to withhold state funds to any municipality that uses ranked choice voting. It passed our house 22-5 iirc
Missouri Amendment 7, Require Citizenship to Vote and Prohibit Ranked-Choice Voting Amendmen
Tl;dr
I was curious so I had to go look and see what states banned it. I was shocked, shocked I tell you to see the states that banned it are:
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, WyomingEdit to add:
Why did you add like a hundred spaces in front of the list of states? That makes it a code block that requires tons of horizontal scrolling to read. I didn’t even recognize it as such at first.
You know Lemmy has spoiler syntax, right? If that’s what you were going for?
As a Texan, it’s a relief to finally not be included on one of these lists for once.
Don’t be too relieved. There’s a bill banning RCV that passed the Texas Senate and is being considered by the House: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1751192
[yeehaws sadly]
Yet. Texas was one of the states where it’s not banned but it’s also not in use anywhere.
A lot ofAbout half the states that haven’t banned it actually use RCV in some or all elections.Don’t worry, there’s always 2026!
You’d think it would be democrats worried about another Bernie Sanders coming along.
What is it the republicans are worried about with RCV?
The magas only gained their stranglehold on the party, despite being a minority, due to the neocons splitting their primary ballots.
The left wing vote is split, so the Republicans can win just by getting the largest number of votes with first-past-the-post.
I don’t know because they shouldn’t be.
Republicans like Senator Tom Cotton and Donald Trump have garnered headlines for stating their opposition to ranked choice voting after election results didn’t turn out exactly as they hoped. Their preferred candidates, Sarah Palin in the House and Kelly Tshibaka in the Senate, didn’t win. Both are Republicans. So, they claim (loudly) that RCV is biased against Republicans or “rigged.”
For those non-USians reading this, the pattern is: states which tend to vote Republican and thus have majority Republican governance. So called “red states”.
Does it also shock you that Iowa is on the short list to do the same?
Nope. I live in Minnesota and I’m well aware of what I.O.W.A. stands for.
I’m curious what you got for I.O.W.A. I hate this place, so I love anything that bags on us.
Idiots out wandering around. Not everybody in the state is an idiot but the ones that are, are out wandering around.
I’ve always known it as “Idiots Out Wandering Around”
Is anybody surprised that you could replace the orange with red and have a pretty accurate election map?
What are you guys scared of? Democracy?
In Kansas it surprises me that Kelly signed it; I’d be more inclined to believe that the Republican supermajorities pushed it past a veto.
It looks like it passed with a veto proof majority that probably included some democrats. Link
Can anyone explain to me why a BAN was even needed? If a State is FPTP that’s the way it is; why do they need to say a different way is not allowed? Especially because of that different way were to actually be viable enough to become law it would just be a one two step - repeal the old, then institute the new.
It’s an attempt to proactively prevent any progressive progress.
Changing the voting system involves changing the law, doesn’t it? Can’t you just revert the ban in that very same bill?
Edit: Ah, I just saw in another comment that this affects lower levels of government that wouldn’t have the power to make this change.
The Ohio HoR just overwhelming voted to remove all state funding from any city that implements ranked choice voting. It threatens the parties in power, so they are both eager to stomp it out
The link gives some arguments. It’s mostly stupid right wing claptrap.
Opponents of ranked-choice voting argue that it benefits voters with more time and information, leads to decreased voter confidence in elections, and disconnects voting from important issues and debates. Opponents of ranked-choice voting also argue that RCV winners do not necessarily represent the will of the voters.
It goes on to giving statements for those reasons from such respectable organizations as The Heritage Foundation, so do what you want with that.
I’m an opponent of RCV for none of those reasons.
No, I hate it because it’s deeply flawed and provides zero of the benefits that proponents claim it does.
Rather than help third parties, it actually hurts them.
The inventor of the system, created it as an example of a bad voting system. This was in 1790.
There’s far more ballot spoilage when compared to any other system.
It doesn’t eliminate the spoiler effect, just kicks it down the ballot a bit,
It’s confusing to count, which has led to the wrong candidate being sworn in.
It requires centralized counting, which is a single point of failure or attack.
And finally there are better, simpler systems that actually do the things that RCV proponents claim RCV
They don’t want sub-divisions of the State (cities/towns) to implement RCV in their local elections. Probably to avoid the idea to spread. It like Democracy/Republicanism. When the French got rid of their monarchy, all the monarchs of nearby countries were afraid the sentinment would spread, same thing here.
Edit: spelling
That makes a lot of (unfortunate) sense, other than Kelly approving it (I’m in Kansas). I’ll need to dig in more and make sure it wasn’t just a veto overridden by the Republican supermajorities, or else wasn’t a poison pill attached to must have legislation.
https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1781139
Blue State Republicans are usually more “liberal” than Red State Democrats. State politics and Federal politics are different.
Because they don’t believe in choice, freedom, or even democracy. They merely support the ideal and facilitate the illusion.
Anything that empowers voters to either dilute the two-party hegemony (where both parties are accountable to the same pool of donors) or elect party members that haven’t been carefully vetted by insiders is a threat to entrenched power structures. Adding roadblocks now ensures that transitions to better systems are made that much more challenging via peaceful and lawful means.
Alaska passed it. The election results didn’t go as expected. Everyone in one party (guess) freaked out and started passing bans nationwide.
They tried to repeal RCV in Alaska too, but it failed by a slim count
even after 100:1 repeal money advantage. They’ll probably try again: https://alaskapublic.org/elections/2024-11-20/alaskas-ranked-choice-repeal-measure-fails-by-664-votesEdit: misread the fundraising number.
I just read about it. Apparantly, most voters preferred the republican Begich over other 2 candidates and Begich is the Condorcet winner, so I could see why they’d be upset at the result.
Fun fact, Condorcet is the inventor of RCV, and threw it out because it almost never produces the Condorcet winner.
Nope, the “No” campaign (keeping ranked choice voting) outspent the campaign to repeal ranked choice voting by 100:1, largely with out of state money.
Former Lt. Gov. Loren Leman, an advocate for repeal, said he hopes the Legislature will pass a law getting rid of the voting system, but if that doesn’t happen, another repeal initiative is possible.
“I would say half of Alaskan voters were influenced, at least in part, and maybe in large part, by big money from outside the state,” he said by phone. “And ours was a grassroots, homebody campaign.”
The No on 2 campaign attracted nearly $14 millionin contributions, largely from outside the state, and outspent the Yes on 2 campaign by a 100-to-one margin.
My bad. Corrected.
Thanks!