Ranked Choice Voting requires constituents to rank their favorite PNs in order of preference. There are many different types of RCV, but we have elected Multi-Winner Ranked Choice Voting. Like regular RCV, Multi-Winner RCV eliminates the PN with the least first-choice rankings, assigning votes based on the second choices of those who ranked the last-place PN first. Rather than continuing this process until there is one PN standing, however, Multi-Winner RCV leaves two PNs standing.

Practical Positives

RCV is the most widely known and used alternative voting method in the United States. Groups like FairVote and Rank The Vote are power players within the election reform community. While many opponents of RCV have expressed concerns over the complexity of the system, research conducted by Fair Vote has shown that most voters tend to think of RCV as relatively simple and easy. For instance, in the recent New York City mayoral Democratic primary (which used RCV), 81% of respondents to a Fair Vote exit poll claimed that they understood RCV well or extremely well, with a further 76% of respondents claiming that it should continue to be used or even be expanded.

Analytical Positives 

The primary analytical positive of RCV is its ability to accurately reflect each voting group according to their proportional representation within the electorate. For instance, a 2021 study taking into account four separate case studies from around the country found that proportional representation (or something close to it) was provided in all cases (Benade et al, 2021). Due to the small number of PNs who will move onto the next round, representation that is exactly proportional will be difficult to achieve. That said, RCV’s ability to create proportional representation means that a majority of voters will always be represented in the Debate Round (OSR, 2025).

Finally, unlike some other methods which are evaluated in this paper, RCV allows voters to express their preference between candidates that they’re voting for. This sort of preferential voting encourages constituents to express their wishes more fully which will hopefully lead to fewer strategic decisions. 

Practical Negatives 

As RCV is one of the most widely used alternative voting methods, it has also become heavily politicized since gaining prominence. As of 2025, it has been banned by 13 state governments around the country, dwarfing the two state governments that have fully adopted it. Although our nomination contests aren’t technically the same as the “elections” that are governed by state laws, the use of RCV could still present an issue in areas where it is banned in public elections.

Such opponents tend to point to examples like that of Alameda County, which declared the wrong candidate the winner of a 2022 school board election as a result of an error on the part of the person tallying the votes (Hassan, 2022). In many other cases, such as New York’s 2025 democratic primary election, RCV has been readily adopted by the voting population, (Hutchinson et al, 2025) (Mantel, 2025). 

Analytical Negatives

The first problem with RCV has to do with the practice of Bullet Voting. While Bullet Voting is welcome in some systems where the number of selected candidates is akin to how many candidates one prefers or approves of, RCV is designed so that all ranking slots are filled. As a result, when constituents vote for only one candidate, and their candidate is eliminated, they suffer from Ballot Exhaustion. If enough ballots are exhausted, the contest will fail to achieve a Mutual Majority or Condorcet Committee. (write something separate about being forced to rank all four and testing that)

Moreover, the “Center-Squeeze Effect” is a problem that is specific to RCV and Plurality Voting. In this scenario, there are a series of candidates on the left and right of the political spectrum and at least one in the center who is one of the Condorcet Committee Winners. However, since there are a plethora of candidates whose relatively extreme positions may attract more first place votes, first choice rankings could be pulled away from the most-preferred central candidate, resulting in their elimination from the contest. In such cases, more moderate candidates with a wider but less intense base of support may lose out to more niche candidates with more intense supporters (also known as spoilers) (Bardal et al, 2025). That said, the possibility of such a scenario is less likely in our system due to our use of a version of AV in the first elimination rounds, which tends to moderate fields of candidates as they are whittled down.