American democracy has a structural problem baked into its foundation: the winner-take-all voting system that decides most elections. In plurality voting, you pick one candidate, the highest vote count wins, and everyone else loses—even if that winner only captured 35% of the vote. It's a system that practically manufactures spoiler candidates and splits votes in ways that can hand victory to the least popular option in the room.
But there's a measurable alternative gaining ground. Ranked choice voting lets you rank candidates by preference instead of picking just one. If nobody wins a majority on the first count, the last-place finisher is eliminated and their votes get redistributed to voters' second choices. The process repeats until someone has genuine majority support.
A team of mathematicians recently tested this theory at scale. They analyzed over 2,000 ranked choice elections across the U.S., Australia, and Scotland, then ran 60 million simulated elections to stress-test the numbers. The results were unambiguous: ranked choice voting outperformed plurality voting by a significant margin.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxThe Numbers Tell the Story
Plurality voting produced spoiler candidates up to 15 times more often than ranked choice. It was also 50% more likely to elect what the researchers called an "extreme" candidate—someone without broad support. Ranked choice voting, by contrast, selected strong, broadly-supported candidates up to 18 times more frequently. It was nearly immune to vote-splitting and resistant to tactical voting games like "bullet voting" or strategically burying an opponent's name.
The shift changes candidate behavior too. In ranked choice elections, the winning strategy isn't to appeal to a narrow base of true believers—it's to build policies that resonate across the widest possible coalition. Alaska's 2022 special House election illustrated this. Democrat Mary Peltola won by positioning herself in the center-left while embracing some conservative positions, ultimately securing second-place votes from Republican supporters. Under the old plurality system, that coalition-building approach would have been political suicide.
Critics point to statistical edge cases where the ranked choice winner wouldn't have won in a direct head-to-head matchup. The researchers found these scenarios almost vanishingly rare—less than 1% of the time.
The takeaway is straightforward: plurality voting is a system that rewards narrow appeals and forces voters into tactical compromises instead of honest choices. Ranked choice voting produces candidates with actual majority support and gives voters permission to vote their true preferences. As trust in democratic institutions continues to erode, the case for structural reform keeps getting stronger. Several U.S. jurisdictions have already adopted it; more are watching the results closely.
