Democratic National Committee insiders are poised to ban the use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in selecting their presidential nominee in 2028 – overriding presidential primary laws in Maine and Washington, D.C, and squashing great interest in this use of RCV among state legislators and the many state parties who run their own primaries.
Presidential primaries are among the most compelling use cases for RCV. They draw crowded fields of candidates that voters get to know and are eager to rank rather than be limited to one. Parties must unite their big tent of voters, and RCV rewards unifying candidates. The sequential nature of primaries is a problematic fit with early voting – in 2020, for example, more than three million Democratic voters cast a ballot for a candidate who had withdrawn before that vote was counted.
But the senior citizens who dominate the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) reflect the conservatism I’ve found among many older people on adopting RCV. The age gap in support for RCV is breathtaking. While that makes me optimistic for the future of RCV as a reform, it reflects a short-term challenge in a nation that too often looks and acts like a gerontocracy.
Even among seniors, however, support for RCV is strong among Democrats. Maine, for example, has the nation’s oldest median age, yet its voters adopted RCV for state and congressional elections on the ballot in 2016, ratified that support in a 2018 referendum, and had its legislature extend RCV to presidential primaries and general elections heading into 2020. A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that among registered Democrats in Maine, the state’s RCV law is supported by an overwhelming 84% to 6% margin.
Maine’s Democratic Party leaders, of course, want to keep using RCV for presidential primaries. Washington, D.C. voters are also enthusiastic about RCV after its successful rollout in primaries this June in the wake of 73% of voters passing RCV for all DC elections, including the 2028 presidential primaries. State Democratic Party leaders in Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming used RCV in 2020 and want to use it again, as do other states like Iowa.
But the Rules and Bylaws Committee recently passed language mirroring the position of national Republicans who voted to block use of RCV after the GOP in the U.S. Virgin Islands used RCV in 2024. The proposed rule would ignore any rankings on an RCV ballot by only awarding delegates based on first choices. While some RBC members are protesting that this proposed rule is not a “ban,” that’s disingenuous. It would be analogous to a rule that vote-by-mail ballots could be cast in a presidential primary, but only in-person votes would count toward awarding delegates. That would as effectively ban vote-by-mail as the proposed rule bans RCV.
The RBC’s surprise attack on RCV was organized by Frank Leone, a long-time opponent of RCV who had badly lost local battles among Democrats in his previous city of Arlington (VA) and his current home of Washington, D.C. Leone’s tactic was to mislead RBC colleagues that RCV is somehow incompatible with the party’s long-time proportional representation requirement. That claim is absolutely false, yet RBC leaders like Leone and RBC co-chair Jim Roosevelt have shamelessly made that argument in Maine news articles about the controversy.
As spelled out clearly in the state plans approved by the RBC in 2020 and in the Washington, D.C law, RCV would be used not to elect a majority winner, but with a “bottoms up” rule. That is, trailing candidates would be dropped (either sequentially or all those under 15% at once) until the remaining candidates are all above the viability threshold of 15% for earning delegates.
Some RCV ban backers suggest this way to use RCV is a “frankenstein,” but it closely aligns with Democratic Party rules for in-person caucuses, like in Iowa, where participants have a chance to realign with a viable candidate if their first choice has too little support to earn delegates.
Using RCV this way in 2020 led to nearly 100% of voters having their ballot count for a viable candidate earning delegates in the four states where we have data. In these contests, more than 99.8% of voters cast a valid ballot, and nearly 90% of the backers of withdrawn candidates had their ballots counted in the final round for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Done nationally, it would have led to more than 2.5 million votes for withdrawn candidates counting for an active candidate.
RBC rules are rarely overturned, but the full DNC at its August meeting may do just that. Many state party leaders not asked for their opinion are shocked by the committee’s divisive overreach. They’d prefer Democrats to focus on winning elections, not picking internal battles where a party gerontocracy overrides state parties being able to use RCV to attract more participation by younger voters, make more votes count, and reward a more unifying nominee. We'll soon find out if the DNC agrees.
Rob Richie is a co-founder of FairVote and the president of Expand Democracy.
