Daily Herald opinion: Toward better democracy: ranked choice voting coming back to forefront in 2026

The discussion about ranked choice voting for Illinois has gone quiet in the last year and a half, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it had been buried, killed by a fear of change.

Happily, the proposal isn’t dead and it isn’t dormant. In fact, debate over RCV is expected to re-emerge and even peak in 2026. That’s when the Illinois legislature’s Ranked-Choice and Voting Systems Task Force is expected to issue the report they’ve been working on since January 2024, one that we anticipate will encourage a form of RCV be adopted in Illinois. Then, legislation will be written, and a campaign to educate voters about the pros and cons will begin. Lively debate will ensue.

A refresher: ranked choice voting is an electoral system for races with three or more candidates, that doesn’t declare a winner until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote. Voters go to the booth only once, but instead of being limited to choosing one candidate, they can rank the hopefuls as first choice, second choice, third choice, etc.

Imagine a lively suburban mayoral race that has five candidates. Under today’s rules, on election day whoever gets the most votes wins, even if the winner gets only 25% of the vote. Under RCV, however, the candidate who finished fifth would be eliminated and voters who chose him/her as their first choice will now have their second-choice votes counted instead. If one of the remaining four candidates now ends up with 50% plus one vote, they win. If not, the race moves into a third round of counting, in which the fourth-place finisher is eliminated and his/her voters will have their second choices counted. And so on.

Why is ranked choice voting desirable? Primarily, it means that more voters have a hand in choosing a winner and therefore may feel a greater stake in that administration. Today, when a mayoral candidate wins with 25% of the vote, it means that 75% of voters wanted someone else. That’s no mandate, and nothing about it inspires enthusiasm. And while no voter is required to vote for more than one person under RCV, the point is that voters can choose also-rans they can live with, if their first choice doesn’t pan out.

There’s a bonus in that ranked choice voting also encourages more issues-oriented campaigning and fewer personal attacks, for practical if not moral reasons. If Candidate A refers to Candidate B as a loathsome toad, he/she will tick off voters who like Candidate B for their first choice, rendering it less likely those voters will choose Candidate A for their second choice. And Candidate A might well need those second-choice votes to put himself/herself over the top.

Hawaii, Alaska, Maine and the District of Columbia have approved statewide and federal ranked choice voting. Elsewhere, New York City and other cities within Minnesota, California, Oregon, Massachusetts and Virginia have approved RCV for local elections. In Illinois, Evanston voted in 2022 to implement ranked choice voting in municipal races and has been battling in court since then to force the Cook County Clerk’s Office to make it happen. A Cook County judge has ruled that the Illinois Election Code essentially bars ranked choice voting, because it says a ballot is invalid if a voter marks more candidates than there are persons to be elected to office. Statewide legislation that approves RCV would presumably solve that problem.

There’s real benefit in being able to apply ranked choice voting to federal primaries, because those produce the most “wasted” votes of any election. Why? Because more candidates drop out by election day, rendering early votes for them pointless. In presidential primary years, the party currently out of power will typically start with dozens of candidates, who winnow themselves out as the money dries up and attention shifts elsewhere. According to state Sen. Laura Murphy (D-Des Plaines), co-chair of the task force, in the 2020 presidential primaries more than 70,000 Democratic and 30,000 Republican votes were wasted because early and vote-by-mail voters cast ballots for candidates who had dropped out by the time Illinois' primary day arrived.

In Illinois, it will take more than successful legislation to get RCV implemented for statewide or presidential primary elections. We have no statewide election authority here, empowered to count votes. Illinois is a “bottom-up” state, meaning that all votes are counted strictly at the local level. Those votes are reported to the Illinois State Board of Elections, but the ISBE does not count them. Instead, Illinois has 108 election authorities — one in each of the 102 counties and another six municipal election authorities, like those in Chicago and Aurora. We like our system: It keeps election results local, and it is theoretically harder to hack — someone who wants to tamper with Illinois election results would have to break into 108 different systems.

RCV comes with some negatives, but to us, a system that calls for winners to be elected with more than 50% of the electorate’s buy-in outweighs them. Yes, fringe candidates are less likely to survive the run-offs, but that’s more or less the point: Election reforms like ranked choice voting put greater emphasis on moderate candidates and majority viewpoints. Yes, when RCV is triggered in a particular race, it will take longer to declare a winner. Yes, it will cost money to upgrade election equipment — at least in some places — to allow for ranked choice voting. Yes, some people will find the system confusing and education is paramount.

We eagerly await the legislative task force’s report, to find out whether it will call for the creation of a statewide election authority, or merely promote allowing each of the 108 election authorities to implement RCV on their own. We prefer the former, but either way, it’s a start.