Voting booths. (Stock photo: Henry Redman/States Newsroom.)
Ohio House lawmakers have approved a measure to ban ranked choice voting. Under the bill, no state elections may be conducted based on ranked-choice voting, and any local government that chooses to exploit a ranked-choice system will forfeit state dollars.
Ohio Senate Bill 63 passed the state Senate last May with bipartisan support. The House vote of 63 to 27 gained the support of two Democrats — Ohio Reps. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown, and Daniel Troy, D-Willowick. The measure leverages the Local Government Fund, a key revenue source for counties and cities across the state, to warn against local ranked-choice activities.
In a written statement before the vote, Rank the Vote Ohio executive director Denise Riley said threatening local funds amounts to coercion. She expressed disappointment that lawmakers banned the practice, even though no municipalities in the state exploit it yet. There were two cities, Lakewood and Cleveland Heights when considering whether to include this practice on the ballot.
Overall, Riley argued that shifting voter support to a ranked-choice system “solves a lot of the problems.”
“No more spoilers. No more ‘wasted votes.’ And encourages positive campaigns, according to American Bar Association Task Force on American Democracy.”
House lawmakers passed an amendment clarifying that petition documents submitted by a political candidate to submit a ballot are a public record. The bill now returns to the Senate.
Debate on the dance floor
Ohio Rep. Sharon Ray, R-Wadsworth, warned that ranked-choice voting “poses serious implementation problems.”
This approach gives voters the opportunity to choose multiple candidates for one office in the order of their preferences. In a typical system, the lowest performing candidate is eliminated in subsequent rounds. However, if voters who supported the eliminated candidate have additional candidates on their ballots, their vote will be transferred to the next choice in the next round.
Ray, who previously served on the Medina County Board of Elections, took notice of the Ohio Secretary of State’s warnings.
“While some voting machines may be able to accept the software upgrade necessary to tabulate votes, the upgrade would be significant and expensive,” Ray said. “Election boards with older machines will most likely need to be replaced.”
Ohio Rep. Ron Ferguson, R-Wintersville, warned that ranked-choice elections could take days or even weeks to tabulate and delivered a tortured defense of the “one person, one vote” rule.
“We don’t vote for three, four or five people. We vote for one person,” he said. “This is the foundation of this republic.”
Although ranked choice systems allow a voter’s preferences to be reflected in multiple rounds of tabulation, that voter still only receives one vote.
Rep. Adam Bird pointed to research suggesting ranked choice does not reduce political polarization and maybe weaken minority voter representation. He added that the public education campaign that would be necessary for a recent selection ranking system could be steep.
Above all, he expressed frustration with the concept of vote transfer.
“I can point to Alaska,” he said. “This happened in 2022, when there were three candidates, the two Republican candidates received 60-70% of the vote. However, once this process is implemented, the Democrat wins.”
“In Maine in 2018” – Bird continued – “The Republican wins the first round, but receives less than 50% of the vote due to the presence of two independent candidates. And so when the ballots are exhausted, the Democrat ends up winning.”
It’s true that he’s a Republican in Maine he got plural in the first roundand in subsequent rounds the Democrat came out on top. But this contradicts Bird’s argument in Alaska.
The 2022 election cycle was closely watched as former Republican Party vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election. If Bird meant it this raceit’s true that GOP candidates total received the majority of votes in the first round, but the most votes of all candidates were won by Democrat, former US Republican Mary Peltola. In subsequent rounds, her margin increased until it reached 50%.
When she ran again this year general electionsPeltola won again and actually improved on its margins.
Rejection
The only lawmaker to oppose the proposal was Ohio Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey, D-Cincinnati. She argued selection ranking version Cincinnati used in municipal elections from 1925 to 1957 helped augment minority representation.
“This system reduced the dominance of a single political machine and made Council representation more proportional,” said Bryant Bailey. “Under this system, African-American candidates began to be elected to councils.”
One of the beneficiaries was Ted Berry, who became Cincinnati’s first black mayor, Bryant Bailey explained.
She referenced Bird’s research, explaining that she had seen plenty of peer-reviewed research that showed minorities do quite well, and maybe even participate at a higher rate, under ranked choice.
“Each of us can find something that will confirm our plans,” said Bryant Bailey.
In closing, she clarified that she was not in favor of a ranked choice system and did not believe the debate was actually about ranked choice.
“This bill is not about voter protection. It’s about control,” she said. “This bill effectively bans ranked choice, but more than that, it tells our cities and our voters that we don’t trust them to govern on their own.”
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