RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.
(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn’t update the title text)
As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.
- Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
- West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
- Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
- North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
- Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.
Six states banned RCV in 2024.
Why YSK: If you’re a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don’t allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.
Edit: fixed formatting
Edit 2: Added in the map so you don’t have to click the link:
See the pattern? 🤔
There was a STRONG effort to ban (or at least end) RCV here in Alaska, and it failed, but barely. They even did the super misleading wording, too, in order to make it unclear if the measure banned RCV or supported it.
I was always so confused by the adamant support that was being shown by general people, though. Like, I get why both Dems and Republicans would be against it: they want to be the only two players in the game. But why any general people would want less choice is beyond me. And it’s funny, because the staunchest proponents (at least where I am) were conservatives, when (again, where I live) RCV basically drove out the Democrats. There were Progressives, there were “centrists,” there were Libertarians, and then there was Republican/MAGA. Dems didn’t even get enough support to be on the ballot. So their hated Libs were wiped off the board entirely for being so ill-liked, but they want to get rid of that system? I just don’t get it.
Don’t worry. Voting altogether will be next.
The fact that Americans banned it, means it good for the people.
Lol home of the free, what a shit hole
What is a ban going to do.
It just changes the language of the acceptance bill
Pre-empts local laws preventing sub-divisions of the State (Cities, Towns) from enacting their own election system that would use “ranking” as a method of determining candidates winning or losing.
Renaming the system will not bypass the ban.
Nothing screams “democracy” like explicitely banning a voting system
well, to be fair, shitty electoral systems should be banned, like FPTP, because they aren’t representative. what’s happening here is sadly the opposite.
It still shouldn’t be banned, it should be up for debate when picking a system. Explicitly banning a system is pretty much anti-democratic by nature.
No it is not. Agreeing on that it should be banned is a democratic choice. It is an anti-democratic system not fit for purpose in 2025. our understanding of electoral science and maths is much more advanced now. FPTP should NEVER be on the table.
FPTP is fine in many small scale applications. How should a town of 5,000 people elect their mayor otherwise?
Approval
Ranked choice is still better though… scale doesn’t really matter here, the point is to let people vote for who they want, not for who they think might win.
On that level you often only have two, one or sometimes no candidate.
There is no need to enforce a more complicated system that needs to be explained to everyone, risks more people accidentally voting different than they wanted or invalidating their vote by misunderstanding the rules.
I have helped with elections in Germany where the parliament has two votes. One for the local candidate FPTP and one for a party, where the parties proportional rates are then assembled in the parliament. I had to explain people the votes and what they do all the time. Because the two votes are on one paper it is a mess to count, as you can’t just stack them easily because of the possible combinations.
When it gets to state and national levels having proportional systems for parliaments and ranked choice for single candidates i am all for it. But there is no point in pushing for a more complicated system for smaller elections.
It’s not anymore complicated. This is the exact argument that got it banned in my state. Because some people think we’re too stupid to count to 2. No if there are only 2 candidates you vore for one or the other and if you really want to be special you can rank them even if it won’t matter. This is not a difficult concept.
Yeah that makes sense. I guess once people get used to ranked voting in large elections, then you could have it in small elections too. Thanks for the reply.
Explicitly
Ranked choice should be the standard
This is democrats and Republicans not wanting people to vote for their candidate of choice because they have to constantly play the game of the lesser of two evils. They wanna keep power
Not even one state that has banned it is run by Democrats.
Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.
5/6 are Republican shitheads however.
Kansas has Republican supermajorities in both legislative houses. She didn’t have a choice but to sign.
This is the reality of the ‘both sides…’ arguments, yes both sides are guilty of doing despicable things but the scales are very heavily tipped in one direction.
Unfortunately with how far americans have legislated and tightened the stranglehold on control of the ‘democratic’ process, i dont see this ever being undone… ‘willingly’…While Kansas has a Democratic governor, I wouldn’t call it a blue state. State Congress is likely all red. This was likely a ballot measure and the people voted on it. The governor just put into law what the people voted on. Nothing more.
While Kansas has a Democratic governor, I wouldn’t call it a blue state.
Ah so the one time it happened it doesn’t count.
So I looked into this being from Kansas it kind of pissed me off. Turns out she won with like 49% where the Rs got only 47 and two different third parties took about 4%. So Rs were pushing for it thinking those that cast third party would put them next over the Dem, while calling them wasted and spoiled votes. So this was proposed by the Wichita mayor under the guise that RCV was too complicated for people to understand, and likely kelly signed the ban because of fear she might lose her minor majority. Total fucking bullshit politics as usual.
Your right about that, it is a fair thing to point out. However, I will mention that the democratic party has a hostile past to 3rd parties where they would do things like suing them to get them off ballots.
Here is one example for reference: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-lawsuits-voting-north-carolina-raleigh-48f1e61c1988c7083edcdc7bb1eace4a
And this is why you have the 2A
We voted for it at the county level here in CA. That was back in 2020. San Diego county voted to use RCV, as did several other counties in CA. The county registrar of voters is refusing to change from FPTP, and is waiting to see how the lawsuits turn out.
Even if your state hasn’t banned it, they will fight you tooth and nail not to change it.
Ohio is trying to ban it this year.
I get why Gen alpha use “Ohio” to describe something bad now
God damn Skibidi Ohio polititians with no rizz, no cap fr fr, voters with brainrot smh
(sorry for the use of Gen alpha brainrot language)
I know a number of Gen alpha kids. None of them use those phrases. They are Gen Z terms.
The oldest Gen Alpha kids are 11 and turning 12 this year
I’m gen z and never heard the words “skibidi” “rizz” irl
I did hear “no cap” and “Alpha”/“Beta” tho
How many 13 year old gen-Z do you know though? A fifteen year time band encompasses a lot of people (because these are just marketing tools in reality)
Yea these terms are quite loosely defined. I had the mental image of people around my age group in mind. Like around 2000 to 2005 birth year.
Don’t know any 13 year olds, who are I guess technically “Gen Z”. So I guess I should use the term “Post 2005 Kids” instead. 😅
Yeah, obscenely gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the state legislature really sucks.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
seeing so many upvotes on this comment made my morning.
remember, we can plan anonymously online by posting plans in the form of if/then scenarios. example: if i were trying to put the richest american oligarchs in check, i would first need a list of who they are widely disseminated to the masses.
i’m not advocating that, i’m just saying IF that’s what i were trying to do, that’s how i would do it.
At what point is a democracy not a democracy any more?
A better question would be “when was there ever been a true democracy?”
For me, there hasn’t been. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. It means that we need to truly internalise that wealth and power will, if left unchecked, succeed in perverting it entirely. We need to be ever augmenting it, with that in mind, with a view to playing whack a mole with the interests of the 1% and keeping it working for the 99%.
I mean that won’t work either. The rich and powerful will never allow us to simply vote away their ill beggoten wealth and power. However, at least people could say that they tried.
I don’t think we’ll ever have a “true” democracy.
Its like the concept of “utopia”, you can get closer and closer, but never actually reach it
Like an asymptote in mathematics.
For the U.S., the decisive blow came with the Citizens United ruling, although it’s not unreasonable to suggest the refusal to punish Nixon during watergate signaled that the rule of law was merely a suggestion. That kicked off a whole cascade of political and legal maneuvering to get both the legislative and societal landscape into such a contortion that it would willingly hand away the entire nation to vulture-capitalists.
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People keep commenting this without context and it’s driving me mad. It’s factually wrong, so at least tell us what you mean in the figurative sense.
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No, this is just the first time anyone actually invested more than the one sentence into an explanation. Can you give me a little more to look into? I genuinely have no idea what you’re referring to.
African Americans were supposed to be given the right to vote after abolition.
There was a brief period of time during Reconstruction where that happened. However, many states came up with complicated contrivances to make it impossible to vote - poll taxes, “literacy tests,” etc. Effectively, it was a right solely on paper until LBJ in the 60s. Conservatives throwing a massive fit about this is why we have the insane fascistic Right we do right now - they were pro public education until Black kids got to go to the same kids as white kids.
Women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. Conservatives today are trying to revoke the 19th amendment and undo that.
Yes, there’s tons of things that make the process unfair, but does that make the system not be a democracy? It’s a flawed one, one that basically only allows white dudes to vote, but the system is still a democracy.
- Blocked the right to vote for one sex
- Blocked the right to vote for non-whites
- Polls taxes blocked the right to vote for non-whites and the poor
- Excluded Natives from voting
- The first vote for the president had less than 1% of Americans vote, Washington running unopposed for his terms
- Voter ID laws are a tax on the poor
- Gerrymandering where the politicians choose the voters.
- Electoral college
- No time off for voting, meaning the working poor aren’t likely to vote
- Voting by mail blocked by most states, the ones that the EC weighs unequally
- Parties have sued to keep people and other parties off ballots
- Parties have argued before court to not legally require fair primaries, as there’s no legal basis for it
Yeah, democracy.
What if only people who make over $500k annually can vote? Is that still a democracy?
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All that to say it is a democracy after all, just even more condescendingly. Wonderful.
When you refuse to listen to reason, yes you deserve it.
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Okay, then, is Nazi Germany a democracy? It has votes, after all. How about fascist Italy? Is that a democracy?
- For patriots, politicians and NPCs: As long as there is democracy in the name (Democratic Republic of Korea)
- For decent people: As soon as the laws/choices the government produces are no longer what the average person would choose.
Sadly, some states, people voted against ranked-choice-voting in referendum. Seems lile people just hear a complex idea and want to shut it down because it challenged their simplistic worldview.
Not sure. Ancient societies also used FPTP and they are still considered by some Scholars/Historians as “democracy” 🤷♂️
Personally, I think government systems are actually a type of technology. Unfortunately, they aren’t the kind of research where you can easily experiment and iterate upon, since people tend to die in massive numbers if the experiment fails.
The USA is too big to be a democracy. It would need to be several smaller regions/countries that had equal rights when dealing with each other. But its much easier to just force people to do what you want rather than make a mutually beneficial deal.
Mainer here. Its great, except that the governor’s race is specifically exempted from RCV. May have something to do with GOP former governor LePage, but can’t recall before my morning meds…
Tl;dr
I was curious so I had to go look and see what states banned it. I was shocked, shocked I tell you to see the states that banned it are:
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, WyomingEdit to add:
As a Texan, it’s a relief to finally not be included on one of these lists for once.
Don’t be too relieved. There’s a bill banning RCV that passed the Texas Senate and is being considered by the House: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1751192
[yeehaws sadly]
Yet. Texas was one of the states where it’s not banned but it’s also not in use anywhere.
A lot ofAbout half the states that haven’t banned it actually use RCV in some or all elections.Don’t worry, there’s always 2026!
Why did you add like a hundred spaces in front of the list of states? That makes it a code block that requires tons of horizontal scrolling to read. I didn’t even recognize it as such at first.
You know Lemmy has spoiler syntax, right? If that’s what you were going for?
Does it also shock you that Iowa is on the short list to do the same?
Nope. I live in Minnesota and I’m well aware of what I.O.W.A. stands for.
I’m curious what you got for I.O.W.A. I hate this place, so I love anything that bags on us.
Idiots out wandering around. Not everybody in the state is an idiot but the ones that are, are out wandering around.
I’ve always known it as “Idiots Out Wandering Around”
For those non-USians reading this, the pattern is: states which tend to vote Republican and thus have majority Republican governance. So called “red states”.
You’d think it would be democrats worried about another Bernie Sanders coming along.
What is it the republicans are worried about with RCV?
The left wing vote is split, so the Republicans can win just by getting the largest number of votes with first-past-the-post.
I don’t know because they shouldn’t be.
Republicans like Senator Tom Cotton and Donald Trump have garnered headlines for stating their opposition to ranked choice voting after election results didn’t turn out exactly as they hoped. Their preferred candidates, Sarah Palin in the House and Kelly Tshibaka in the Senate, didn’t win. Both are Republicans. So, they claim (loudly) that RCV is biased against Republicans or “rigged.”
The magas only gained their stranglehold on the party, despite being a minority, due to the neocons splitting their primary ballots.
They gained their stranglehold from 20+ years of systematic takeover. The Tea Party became MAGA. It didn’t happen over night
I never said it did. First past the post is what allowed that to happen.
In MO. Voted on it last year. The ballot was intentionally worded to be misleading.
It said each person can only cast one vote. Making it sound like it was to prevent people from voting twice even though that person as already not allowed.
So dumb.
They just pulled that in the Ohio House this week. They have been calling it “One Person, One Vote” and are going to withhold state funds to any municipality that uses ranked choice voting. It passed our house 22-5 iirc
Missouri Amendment 7, Require Citizenship to Vote and Prohibit Ranked-Choice Voting Amendmen
Golly what a surprise! Duopoly gonna duopoly!
Remember that you still have power in this system by not voting for a party if they do not fulfill your demands.
Statistically when you don’t vote, you are effectively voting Republican. When turn out is high Dems tend to win, and when it’s low the GOP wins.
Not voting is definitely not going to change anything
Or vote against the one party (starts with an R) that continues to make the duopoly happen by banning RCV, and for the party (starts with a D) that’s far more likely to implement RCV.
People don’t vote in primaries enough.
AOC did it. Beat the corporate PoS. We can all do it.
And if they try to rig it, we do a little French-style direct action 😏
