Voters in the District approved a measure on Tuesday to implement ranked-choice voting in the city, which political scientists and initiative stakeholders said could have mixed results in terms of increasing voter representation in elections.
Initiative 83 passed with 72.8 percent of the vote, allowing independent voters to vote in primary elections starting in 2026 and changing D.C.’s voting system to ranked-choice voting — a system where voters can rank up to five candidates by preference instead of selecting one. Political scientists said there is a lack of consensus about if the measure will elect more minority candidates and candidates with broad electoral appeal, while the measure’s supporters said it will improve voter input in D.C. elections.
Under the initiative’s system, if a candidate wins more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, they win the race. If no candidate receives the majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated and people who put that candidate first have their vote transferred to their second choice. The process continues until a candidate has a majority of votes. The D.C. Council will need to appropriate funds for the measure to be implemented, which will likely happen next summer.
Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and Oregon all rejected statewide ballot measures to implement ranked-choice voting on Tuesday. The system is currently used in Alaska and Maine for statewide elections.
Before the measure, only registered partisans could vote in D.C. primary elections, meaning more than 75,000 registered independents in the District cannot choose the candidates that will compete in the general election.
Andy Eggers, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, said it is hard to measure the effects of ranked-choice voting because so few jurisdictions have implemented it, and most of these areas tend to be more liberal and less representative of how it would work in areas with different partisan makeups.
Eggers’ 2024 study for the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government showed that ranked-choice voting is more likely to elect moderate candidates with broad electoral appeal in certain instances because it incentivizes campaigning to more voters than candidates’ core partisan base. The study concludes that the overall effects of ranked-choice voting are small and depend on the circumstances.
“It’s just really hard, in general, to measure the effects of an institution like this when we can’t run a big experiment, and so what we’re doing is comparing places that adopted it and places that didn’t,” Eggers said. “And if you just look at the set of cities that adopt ranked-choice voting, you can see that they’re not typical cities.”
Eggers said many advocates say that ranked-choice voting will result in more minority candidates being elected. He said this can be true in some instances, but it depends on the demographics of the city and how many minority candidates are running. Overall, the evidence for this claim is “weak,” he said.
“If you’re looking at circumstances where there is a majority of support for, let’s say, women candidates or racial minorities, but there’s a problem that that support is divided among several candidates, then rank choice voting will help ensure that one of those candidates will get elected,” Eggers said.
A 2023 study by Cambridge University researchers concluded that minority candidates are equally disadvantaged in plurality and ranked-choice voting systems but that support for minority candidates can improve under ranked-choice voting if voters are more informed about the candidates.
Ruby Coleman, a master’s student at American University who works for Make All Votes Count DC, a nonprofit that campaigned to get the initiative passed, said because D.C. often has primary contests with multiple candidates running for a party nomination, candidates can win the nomination with as little as 23 percent of the vote.
She said ranked-choice voting would ensure that candidates receive a majority of votes in primary elections.
“There’s no way to get a majority of the vote when you have so many candidates and have so many people choosing between all these options,” Coleman said. “So allowing people to rank their options in order to make sure that we have a majority vote is really important.”
Coleman said the initiative will force politicians to campaign to all of the District to gain wider electoral support instead of continuing their current strategies, which she said often do not include outreach to areas east of the Anacostia River, which encompass Wards 7 and 8.
The Democratic Party of D.C. — including D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson and Mayor Muriel Bowser — publicly opposed the initiative, saying it would confuse voters and undermine Democratic votes in the city.
Coleman said elected Democrats opposed the initiative because they fear they will not be able to win a majority of votes. Bowser received 43 percent of the vote in the Democratic mayoral primary in 2014.
“A lot of elected officials who were opposing this are people who won with less than 50 percent of the vote,” Coleman said. “And it seems like they are a little hesitant to institute a system where you get the majority of the vote because they’re not sure if they would win again. And so I think it’s a matter of retaining power in that regard.”
Larry Jacobs, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, said he did a meta-analysis of data on ranked-choice voting and found little evidence to support many of the benefits advocates of ranked-choice voting claim it has, like increasing the number of candidates of color that get elected.
“It’s been hard for candidates of color to be recruited to build the kind of organization and financial support that white candidates have been able to do, and there’s been some progress in that, but I think that’s still generally the pattern, and ranked choice voting hasn’t overcome that problem,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs said an “iron law” of politics is that wealthier, white candidates tend to have electoral advantages because they have the most resources, face the least discrimination and members of their demographic turn out in large numbers to vote due to systemic advantages. He said ranked-choice voting has failed to solve these structural issues because minority voters and less educated voters are less likely to participate in a system they may not understand.
“If you are white or educated, have higher income, you’re more apt to use the full set of choices that are available in ranking multiple candidates,” Jacobs said. “If you don’t have those traits, then you’re less likely to either participate at all or to use the full set of choices.”
Deb Otis, the director of policy and research at FairVote — a lobbying group that advocates nationwide for ranked-choice voting — said the claim that the system will confuse voters is “not based in real world data,” pointing to the initiative’s large margin of victory in D.C. as evidence that the electorate wants to improve their elections and supports the system.
“Here in D.C., we won big in all eight wards of the city, showing that voters from all across the city are interested,” Otis said. “They understand ranked-choice voting, and they want to use it.”
