Across the country, millions of voters turned in early ballots for the US presidential primary elections, often voting for candidates no longer in the race on election day.

In Colorado and Texas, early voters for candidates other than Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders might have made a statement, but they didn’t have the chance to influence the primary election. Some of the estimated 20% of Californians who voted early asked for a do-over. In Minnesota, 40,000 people had reportedly cast their ballots a week before Super Tuesday – and days before Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out.

Just yesterday, more than a million Washington voters finally had the chance to weigh in. Unlike other states, which saw long lines and voting machine errors, the state votes by mail and has a highly engaged electorate. As a result, a significant proportion of ballots were returned early, essentially throwing away their vote.

Early voting is generally viewed as a good thing by civil rights advocates – it helps avoid errors on election day, and curbs long lines at the precinct. But voting for soon-to-be unviable candidates is not only a frustrating reality for proactive voters, but intrinsically harmful to the democratic process.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: ranked-choice voting (RCV). And it’s one that has the potential to address a host of other problems that plague our electoral system, including negative campaigning and lack of minority representation.

Four states – Alaska, Kansas, Wyoming and Hawaii – are already using ranked-choice voting in the current Democratic presidential primaries, and one state, Maine, uses it for state elections and for US Congress and president. New York City also recently adopted ranked-choice voting beginning in 2021. But most of the country has yet to catch on.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank their favorite candidates in order of preference, and if their first choice is no longer viable, their vote would count towards their next choice. The process would continue until all votes are supporting viable candidates.

If ranked-choice voting had been in place in Washington, voters who turned in their ballot early for Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg or Elizabeth Warren could rest assured that their vote would still count towards their next preference rather than being wasted on a candidate who is no longer in the running. And candidates would probably face less pressure to drop out of the race early.

But reforming our primary elections is only one benefit.

Under the current plurality voting system, candidates benefit from attacking their opponents and highlighting their ideological differences in an effort to appeal to their base. However, in a ranked-choice election, candidates are also campaigning to be voters’ second and third choices.

We saw this happen in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral race: two candidates, Mark Leno and Jane Kim, actually campaigned together to fight for shared values as they reached out to voters in a ranked-choice election. In a political field that is often fraught with negativity, this kind of positive campaigning is a welcome change.

This same system, meanwhile, can help historically marginalized communities achieve representation in their own cities.

Here in Washington, for example, Yakima county is in the middle of a legal challenge under the Washington Voting Rights Act. The population of the county is approximately 49% Latino, but the county has only ever elected one Latino candidate to the county commission – partly because it has an at-large general election system that dilutes minority voting rights.

“We are trying to ensure that we have a more equitable election system here in Yakima county,” Dulce Gutiérrez, a plaintiff in the case, and one of the few Latinx city council members elected told us. “We believe that there are remedies that can improve the likelihood of representation.”

In Yakima, a switch to ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts would help achieve 'proportional representation'

Historically, the remedy has been to move to majority-minority districts that concentrate minority voters in a particular geographic district in order to garner representation. However, such a system is vulnerable to gerrymandering and vote splitting and, perversely, only protects communities of color that live in highly segregated neighborhoods.

In Yakima, a switch to ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts would help achieve “proportional representation” and guarantee that roughly every one-third of the residents is able to pick one of the three commissioners. Latino candidates regularly get more than a third of the countywide vote, but historically are unable to win countywide races.

Washington state has been a leader in adopting commonsense reforms, like mandating marriage equality or legalizing marijuana, but it is well behind the curve in electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting.

We have plenty of real-life examples of ranked-choice voting working for communities. It’s already used in several countries, including Australia, Scotland and New Zealand. It’s also gathering momentum in the United States, where it is used in over 20 jurisdictions.

After all, our democracy is at stake.



• Mohit Nair is partnerships director of FairVote Washington.

• Colin Cole is legislative director and a co-founder of FairVote Washington. He is also policy director at MoreEquitableDemocracy.



