How parties really view ranked choice voting (with Brian Gaines)

In this episode of Illinois Policy Unpacked, host Kristen Chandler speaks with Brian Gaines, Honorable W. Russell Arrington Professor in State Politics for the University of Illinois system. Gaines details his latest policy analysis exploring partisan preferences toward ranked choice voting, along with its potential impact to Illinois, the Republican and Democratic parties, and American voters.  

Transcript

Kristen Chandler

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Illinois Policy Unpacked podcast, where we inform the policy conversation in Illinois and beyond.

For today’s episode, we’re joined by Brian Gaines, IGPA’s Arrington Professor and professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Most of his research focuses on elections, electoral rules, and public opinion.

We’ll be discussing his most recently published piece with IGPA, titled “Partisan Division on Ranked-Choice Voting.” Gaines joins us to explore how support for ranked-choice voting has shifted, and who’s backing or opposing it. It’s a timely, thought-provoking discussion you won’t want to miss. So, sit back and get ready to dive into how this voting method could shape the future of U.S. elections. Brian Gaines, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Gaines
Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 

Kristen Chandler

Great. So, let's start with the basics. Most US elections use a system where voters choose a single candidate and the one with the highest number of votes wins. How does ranked choice voting work? And what makes it different?

Brian Gaines
The first difference is, the ballot offers the voters the chance to rank all the candidates, competing as many as they like. So, if it's the 2000 presidential election and they're in Florida, they can vote for Al Gore, George W. Bush and Ralph Nader, and they can rank them in any way they like, instead of just picking one. 

The second difference is, then, that the when the votes are counted, the initial tabulation is done, and if nobody has 50% of the vote, they eliminate the last place candidate and recount. They recount by transferring the votes that went to the last place candidate to whoever was marked as the second choice on those ballots, if there is someone. So ranked choice voting both has the ranking by the voters, and then usually a series of counts until somebody gets a majority, and if somebody wins majority in the first round, then the rankings are irrelevant. And there's only one count, it looks the same, but if it takes more counts, then you just keep transferring the votes until somebody exceeds 50% and that person wins.

Kristen Chandler

Great. Thank you for highlighting that. What are the most commonly cited benefits and drawbacks of ranked choice voting?

Brian Gaines 
So, the advocates will cite all sorts of benefits. And the most obvious one right away is it collects more information. Voters are allowed to say not just who they like best, but they can place them in order. If they don't want to, they don't have to. They can make their ranking just the top candidate, but they can express preferences amongst the whole set. 

None of this matters if there are only two candidates, then it's the same system. But if there are more than two candidates, then they can, again, basically provide more information about how they feel about this set of candidates. What else does it do? The advocates will say it increases turnout, which I'm really not sure is true. It decreases negativity in campaigning. It will ultimately decrease polarization. Lots of possible effects, but they're pretty indirect, and they're several steps away from the basics of the system. 

What do the critics say? One of the things they say is it's complicated, and I'm going to quibble with that as well. I think lots of Americans are used to ranking their favorite movies or ice cream flavors or songs of the best songs of the year. It's nothing inherently complicated, but ranking, they say it's confusing. It just took me, I don't know, 30 seconds to explain the method. It takes a little longer when there are lots of little details that can vary from city to city, or jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Is it just one candidate who's eliminated after this count, and nobody gets 50% or is more than one eliminated? So, it does take a long time to provide a really thorough description of every detail, but I think in general, the idea is not very complicated. 

But I'm going to say there's a there's one complication that I think is quite surprising for people who've never heard of a system before, and that is that it can cause it's non monotonic. That's the jargon for it. Someone who's winning can end up losing because some of the voters rank them more highly. It doesn't simply turn higher support into a higher probability of winning. That's a genuinely complicated feature. It's not one that comes up that much in public debate, because it takes even more time to explain how that occurs, but I think that that's something that some critics, at least in the elite debate, will say is a worrying point. When you explain it to ordinary voters in, say, focus groups, some of them are bothered by it a lot. There's yet another comeback, which is another complicated one that it's not clear this happens very much. It's very hard to say how often this happens in official elections.

Kristen Chandler

So, it sounds like a pretty complex topic, with a lot of pros and cons. Could you explain a little bit more about you mentioned the negative reduced negative campaigning? Could you explain that a little bit more?

Brian Gaines 
Once there's a multi candidate election, and everybody is not just trying to be the pick of the voters I want to get. If you're not gonna rank me most highly, like to be second place, there's some incentive for me then to sort of not to be attacking other candidates. If my name is Brown, and I want Adams supporters to like me and not like Cole, I don't want to attack Adams too much if I think I want those people who like Adams a lot to like me second most, and likewise, the Cole supporters were thinking, we're not going to get the Brown supporters. Maybe we can get second place instead of Adams. So, to some extent, I think the logic of why the candidates would be a little bit more positive or less negative is clear. It's not totally clear in the empirical record that that shows up. 

If you look in jurisdictions where there is ranked choice voting, which, by the way, also goes by a lot of other names. Sometimes it's called “instant runoff” and sometimes the “single transferable vote.” The naming isn't so important, but the system where the voters can rank the candidates, I think that the jury is still out on whether it really does produce less negative or more positive campaigns, but I think the logic why it might is sort of obvious that candidates aren't just trying to be the top choice. They want their voters who don't like me most, I still don't want to be their bottom choice. I would like to be somewhere in the middle. And I want all the voters to like me a little bit. And that means I don't want to take the gloves off and attacking the other candidates who might be the favorite of some subset of these voters.

Kristen Chandler

Absolutely, so less me-versus-them type of thinking. 

Brian Gaines 
Yeah. I mean, it definitely complicates the dynamics of the campaigning and the voter's choice. I said it's an advantage that it collects more information, but it also makes it a little bit harder to vote. The voters can choose not to learn more about the candidates, but if there are a lot of candidates, it becomes a bit more onerous to think, “I have to rank eight candidates, and I don't know anything about four of them. I'm gonna have to set it aside some more time where and I could have been watching football enough to be paying attention to who these people are and whether I like them or not.”

Kristen Chandler

Thanks for explaining that.

Brian Gaines 
There's a strong movement for it. There advocates are pushing hard, trying to get more cities to adopt it. I should mention Illinois. So Evanston voted to do it, to switch to ranked choice in 2022. Oak Park did in 2024, Skokie has joined them in 2020. In 2025, none of those cities are using it yet because there's a Cook County Court decision that said it's inconsistent with state law, and that ranked choice can't be implemented by a city in Illinois until state election law is changed. That's under appeal. So, for the moment, there are three cities in Illinois that are on that list of cities that have voted to adopt it, but they haven't used it. None of them have none of them has used it yet, and it's pending the appeal for the moment, it's not possible for them to adopt it even though they voted, because of this court ruling.

Kristen Chandler

Okay, and then Evanston, for example, is that for mayoral races only, or is that ranked for other type of races?

Brian Gaines 
Yeah. I mean, a little fast and loose thing. It's used in these cities. Some of the cities use it just for mayor. Some use it for mayor and council, but not for other offices. As I recall, it was for mayor and city council. But if this is another of those fine detail points that if you look at the list of all the places that use it, Maine uses it for most offices, not the state legislature, lots of cities have implemented it for mayor, but not for all the offices, and in some cases, it's only mayor. Not many places have implemented ranked choice for every elective office.

Kristen Chandler

Okay, great. Thanks for clarifying that. Your recent publication with IGPA suggests a partisan split, with Democrats leaning in favor and Republicans pushing back. Is that trend surprising, or does it reflect broader political dynamics?

Brian Gaines 
I think it's a little surprising. I'll say it's not surprising to see Republicans Democrats disagreeing. People talk endlessly about an era of polarization when they disagree about everything, and the Republicans look more like each other and less like the Democrats, and vice versa. So, one of the ways you see this division is in state legislatures. I mentioned that the referenda in 2024 on ranked choice voting almost all ended up failing. Even in the place states where there was a movement to adopt it, it didn't pass. Since then, a number of states have voted to ban it, and that's almost always a Republican-led motion. And so, it's almost all states where the Republicans control all of the government, one of the exceptions is Kansas, and there are Democratic governors signed a bill passed in overly womanly Republican houses. There's a little bit of Democratic support. In Mississippi, Democrats joined Republicans in passing a ban almost everywhere else, it's a straight party vote. Republicans don't want it. They put a ban in place. Democrats like it. They voted against the ban, but failed in the red states, and then blue states don't have bans. 

Is it surprising? And the roll call separation of Repubs and Dems is not surprising. It's not clear to me that all of these votes are reflecting an objective fact that it's good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. I think the kind of back-of-the-envelope logic on it might be, Republicans could like it wherever there's a fairly substantial vote that's kind of on the right, like a libertarian vote, and Democrats maybe would like it more where the minor party that does best is the party more on the left, like the Green Party. And the logic there again, is that Greens can then say, I really want to back a Green candidate that gets he gets my top pick, but then I have to choose being a Republican and Democrat for second spot. I'll go with the Democrat. Not all of them will, but you know, that'd be more common. Libertarians maybe would be a little more favorable to Republicans. So if you're in the major parties, you might think that your view of whether it's good or bad depends mostly on who's the strong minor party. So far, we don't really see that. We don't really see that. We just see Republicans seem to be against it and Democrats for it. And I don't know, again, if that's really because they've studied it closely, or it's just kind of separating into herds and donkeys go with donkeys and elephants with elephants.

Kristen Chandler

And in the places that have implemented ranked choice, voting is one party benefiting more than on the other in ranked choice voting?

Brian Gaines 
That's also quite hard to see. Maine has got the longest record at the state level, and Maine is kind of a purple state. And one of the things that shows up, I think, too, is that it turns out it doesn't actually get implemented that often. So you need a lot of candidates, you need more than two candidates, or else ranked choice is irrelevant in the state legislature. They use ranked choice for the primaries. But almost all the primaries in Maine, like almost all the primaries for almost all the state legislatures the country, don't have very many multi-candidate races, a lot of uncontested races, a fair number with two, hardly any with three or more. 

So, one of the things about the empirical record is it's pretty sparse. There's probably better records from mayoral elections, but a fair amount of number of those are non-partisan, so they're a little bit harder to interpret. Is it helping reaps? It's, you can't tell if it's just a non-partisan office, so I don't think it’s totally obvious again, and I think the fact that the separation is starting to look pretty clear, the Republicans not liking Democrats liking it, could be viewed more as a sort of superstitious learning than that. They've looked at the way it plays out, and they've concluded that somehow it helps Democrats win office and it helps hurts Republicans and prevents them forming office.

Kristen Chandler

Gotcha. So, if ranked choice voting is increasingly seen as a democratic reform, why should people outside of party politics care?

Brian Gaines 
Yeah, I think the point I just made is I'm not telling Republicans that they shouldn't like rules that help Republicans or Democrats. They shouldn't help rules that help Democrats. But I think, apart from the really intensely partisan, most people like fair elections. It turns out even strong Democrats and strong Republicans don't really like gerrymandering very much. If you show them a map that's designed to give their party extra seats and ask them how it compares to a map that's kind of has simpler districts is more fair. A lot of the partisans, even the strong partisans, say they like the simple districts. They don't want maps that cheat. 

I think that on the question all the questions of electoral rules, should there be an ID requirement? What kind of electoral system should use? How should you cast your ballot? How should the ballots be cast? It's not true that ordinary people just think which is best for my party – “that's the one I want.” So I'm pushing all the time for a more substantial debate about all election rules. Do we what are the pros and cons of ID requirements? What are the pros and cons of remote voting? It's no longer a secret ballot. Is that good or bad? And not immediately just thinking which party helps, which party does it hurt? Go with my party. And I think that even if elected officials have a stronger incentive put party first, that an awful lot of the general public, even people who have a clear preference, if they don't have a donkey or tattoo elephant tattooed to their chest, they're open to ideas about tweaking election rules, and they're, I think, interested in alternative that are a sharper break. Not just as “Do you need an idea to vote, but are we going to use a different method of voting, where you get to rank instead of pick a single candidate?” So I think that people who, even with strong party preferences, are thinking about is this a good or a bad idea? Should be presented with a full debate of pros and cons, a careful debate, and not just if you're from this party you should like, if this party should hate. 

Kristen Chandler

Gotcha for the publication that you're producing with IGPA, you mentioned that ranked choice voting is not something we have a ton of data on. What data did you use to do this analysis?

Brian Gaines 
In the Policy Spotlight, I focused mostly on voting, and I talked about the referenda, the 2024 referenda, and in those cases, the pattern is fairly clear that in more democratic areas, the pro rank choice side did better, and then less democratic or more Republican areas, the pro rank choice side did worse. That shows up in the States and it shows up in the cities. So that's a pretty indirect kind of evidence, but it's fairly clear evidence. And then the roll calls I talked about on banning ranked choice, it's very clear the partisan separation is quite dramatic, with a few exceptions, the Mississippi is not as clear, and the Democrat who is the governor of Kansas voted be assigned the bill. 

There's other evidence that isn't in my policy spotlight that I've come across and I'm working on other papers, and one example of that is campaign donations. So, the groups that are behind ranked choice voting, nearly all advertise themselves as bipartisan and nonpartisan. I took the Group Fair Vote, which is one of the prominent groups, and looked at the board members and the people who are the on the staff, and looked for each of them in the FEC data on federal campaign donations, which is public information. If your donation is more than $250, it's reported. And disproportionately the people, insofar as they make donations at all they make them the Democrat Party. Not universally, there are some Republicans in the mix, but more of them are giving money to Democrats than are giving money to Republicans. So that's, again, pretty indirect evidence. Who likes ranked choice voting? Who likes it enough to be on the board of an organization that's spending money and promoting it. There are more Democrats than are there are Republicans. Does that mean it's a reform that necessarily always helps Democrats? No, I don't think so. But if you're a Republican, you're suspicious. That's probably the sort of red flag that would make you think. I still don't understand how this ranking thing works, but it must be something that just helps them and hurts us. So I think, you know, I think there's a set of data that are at least indirect evidence that there's a partisan split on it. But that doesn't mean that the partisan split is reflects objectively, that it's a reform that would only ever help Democrats and hurt Republicans.

Kristen Chandler

Absolutely, given that ranked choice voting isn't very prevalent in the US, it makes sense that voters wouldn't be familiar with it. You touched on this a little bit, but if Illinois were to adopt ranked choice voting, what might that look like in practice?

Brian Gaines 
So it's a very blue state. I've been saying the pattern is that increasingly Democrats seem to like and Republicans don't. So, I think, why? Why wouldn't the state like Illinois adopted then? And there have been bills, but none have gotten anywhere. The easiest answer of me is I don't really know what it would do. I don't think if I said I think that rank choice always helps the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party in Illinois is in pretty good shape. It doesn't necessarily need to tweak electoral rules. You could argue that much of their advantage is already in different electoral rules. That the U.S. House delegation, for example, is heavily Democratic because it was a very skillfully gerrymandered map that exaggerates just how blue the state is. There's some degree of gerrymandering in the state legislative map too, so maybe the Democratic Party doesn't bother to switch the electoral rule because they've already got their thumbs on the scale and other election rules. But I think the best answer is, I don't really know what it would look like.

Illinois did have a very long experiment with a totally different electoral rule. Cumulative voting was used for the Illinois House, not for the Illinois Senate, and not for the U.S. House seats, but for about 100 years, Illinois elected the members of the State House using a similarly complicated, interesting rule where people had three votes to cast, and they could cast them as three votes, all three votes to one candidate, or one and a half to two different candidates, or one to each of three candidates. And it generated lots of data. Political scientists love variations, so we're glad that it was there. It's not clear that it had really dramatic effects, because the Senate was using the more traditional just pick one voting the House and Senate didn't look that different. In the end, even with cumulative voting, it could be that ranked choice, were it in place in Illinois after several election cycles, you'd say, you know, it doesn't really do much. It just makes it takes longer to fill out your ballot. But apart from that, there's not, there's not a sign that it's really shifted politics in a dramatic way. Again, the proponents would say it'll do all kinds of things, higher turnout, less polarization, less negativity, and maybe that would show up, but I'm not certain that I persuaded on all those fronts.

Kristen Chandler

Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else you'd like to share that we haven't mentioned yet?

Brian Gaines 
Well, one of the things I didn't mention that's a potential cost, is, I think anything that slows down vote tabulation has an inherent risk to it, that the longer it takes for official results, the more, and maybe this is an aspect of polarization, but the more suspicion that something is run of foul, that somebody is doing something illegal, or there's there, there's some kind of fraud underway. Whenever there's a change in election rules, election laws, there are usually some for a while, there's some glitches in the transition that people have to adjust to a new kind of ballot, or voting remotely, or whatever. So, I think we should expect that places that switch to some version of ranked choice voting, there might be more error made in the first couple of elections. It's more prone to accidentally spoiled ballots or other sorts of errors that make tabulation hard. But I think beyond that, there's some sign that it's just lower it's inherently harder to do the tabulation. You have to count the votes and you have to do the transfers. You basically process the ballots more times. And I think that that's a legitimate thing to worry about, that the slower the results come out, the more suspicion there is when they're finally released. Maybe in a perfect world, this wouldn't be true, and it can be done with extremely transparent partial results, an explanation of why the results take well. 

But I do worry that in the current culture, slow results just breed conspiracies. People think, if we still don't know who won this election, it's a week later, then somehow somebody's cheating. I don't know how they're cheating exactly, but there's some sort of fraud underway here, and they're rigging things. And this is the death of democracy. So, I worry quite a bit about the effect on public confidence in the result if it's slow. And so far, ranked choice voting is it doesn't have to be extremely slow, but it's kind of slow. In New York City, it's Tuesday as we speak now, and it took them about a week to produce the ranked choice results. In this case, it didn't matter. The projection from the first-round voting was the eventual winner with 40% was going to clear 50%. And people talked as though it wasn't a ranked choice election at all, that it was over, that Cuomo had lost a week later. We know that that's true, but it wasn't the official result until they finished the ranked choice, and it took a while. So I don't, I don't think the proponents should under underestimate the cost involved in having a slow tabulation. I think careful tabulation is most important. But we like slow. We like careful and quick and slow has some very definite bad consequences.

Kristen Chandler

We hope you found today’s conversation on ranked choice voting insightful. A big thank-you to our guest, Brian Gaines, for shedding light on how ranked choice voting could impact future Illinois and U.S. elections. Stay tuned for more conversations that inform the policy conversation in Illinois and beyond. Until next time, thanks for listening.