The Short Life and Quiet Death of Ranked-Choice Voting in North Carolina

There’s a second primary election this week, although, save for the occasional yard sign, you may not know it.

Runoffs, held when no candidate clears the 30 percent threshold for an outright-win, have the unique combination of low voter participation and high expense. On average, fewer than half of the people who voted in the first primary do so the second time around. In Wake County alone, it will cost about $1.7 million to staff the polling sites, run the tabulators, print the ballots and administer the election. 

Given the problems of the current system, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that there is a growing movement for another path forward: ranked-choice voting.

We are used to casting votes one way–you select your top choice and then move on. But ranked-choice voting allows voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference. If the top vote-getter receives a threshold amount of the vote (usually 50 percent), they are declared the winner outright. 

If no candidate reaches that threshold, the second- and third-choice votes are also counted. It is, the idea goes, a rough approximation of a runoff process, but with the voter only having to cast a ballot once. As a result, it’s sometimes called “instant-runoff voting.” Other times it is called “preferential voting.” Mostly, it means that same thing.

But even that somewhat convoluted description is an oversimplification. “There is tremendous variation in the ranked choice family,” explained Jack Santucci, an election expert and author of the book More Parties or No Parties. “Some of that variation was built into the advocacy two decades ago” and “flattened down to this thing called ranked-choice voting.”

While ranked-choice voting advocacy seems to be gaining steam as of late, North Carolina experimented with the system more than 16 years ago.

A Different Time

Our experiment with ranked-choice voting came at a very different time in state politics. Republicans had not controlled the General Assembly in over 100 years, and Democratic Gov. Mike Easley was completing his second term. 

But Democrats sensed that their control might be slipping away. “We were holding on for dear life,” said Susan Fisher, a former Democratic state representative from Buncombe County.

One state representative who was hot on the idea of ranked-choice voting was a Durham Democrat named Paul Luebke. A sociology professor by trade, Luebke had an academic’s mind and a reformer’s heart. And ranked-choice voting, at the time, a relatively obscure electoral reform, was high on his list of policies to enact while his party held onto its last gasp of power.

Luebke introduced the state’s first bill on the matter in 2005. The initial version of the legislation would have implemented an instant-runoff for all statewide party primaries—an audacious goal that wasn’t met with much support. Sensing the dead end before him, Luebke then set his sights on a more attainable goal: instant-runoff voting specifically to fill judicial vacancies, and a pilot that would establish instant-runoff voting for local elections in up to 10 municipalities in the 2007 election and 10 counties in 2008.

The bill quickly made its way through the state House and, after a yearlong hiatus, it passed in the Senate. The Senate’s version then boomeranged back to the House, where it was voted down twice before it passed. Some legislators were surprised, and perhaps even a little annoyed, that the idea was back again. “This thing’s like a vampire, it just won’t die,” Rep. Tim Moore, who opposed the measure, told the Associated Press. 

The future House speaker was right. It didn’t die; it was enacted in 2006 and ready to implement the following year.

Early Attempts

A call went out from the State Board of Elections for municipalities and counties to join the experiment, with 20 slots available to the 662 local governments across the state.

Only two took them up on the offer.

First up was the town of Cary. Their October 9, 2007 non-partisan municipal elections weren’t expected to be a high-turnout affair, so it might provide an ideal test case. 

There was only one problem: The voting machines that Wake County used at the time could not handle ranked-choice voting, so election officials were forced to count second and third choice votes by hand–a difficult task that introduces the potential for more error. Despite protests to the contrary, the accuracy of hands and eyeballs pales in comparison to computers.

In the Cary town council election, Don Frantz won over Vicki Maxwell by just 48 votes. But thanks to both hand-counting of second and third place votes and a recount, the results weren’t clear until a week later. It was a simulation of a runoff, sure, but it wasn’t exactly instant.

Despite some administrative hiccups, exit polling conducted by N.C. State political scientist Michael Cobb showed that the voters, by and large, liked the process. Three quarters of the 1,629 respondents were aware of the process, and 95 percent found ranking candidates to be “very” or “somewhat” easy. Perhaps most importantly, two-thirds preferred ranking candidates to the traditional voting method. 

With one experiment under their belts, the pilot then moved 263 miles west to the Hendersonville city council elections, held November 6, 2007.

Administratively, the Hendersonville pilot worked well. Results were tabulated relatively quickly and there was no need for hand-counting. Exit polling again showed positive results: three-quarters of voters found the system very or somewhat easy to understand, and 65 percent were aware that they would be asked to rank candidates before they arrived.

When the time came to re-up the pilot, Hendersonville said yes and Cary begged out—citing the administrative hurdles. Hendersonville used it again in 2009 to little fanfare, and the city council voted to do the same two years later.

The big test of the new idea, however, came with a third pilot in 2010: a 13-candidate, non-partisan, statewide court of appeals race.

In contrast to Hendersonville and Cary, the court of appeals election required a lot of ballot space—three columns with 13 rows each. This may seem like a minor, even nit-picky detail, but as Wake County Board of Elections member Gerry Cohen reminded me, these details matter.

Longer ballots mean more paper. More paper means more storage. More paper also means that ballot machines fill up more quickly and must be disposed of more often. Longer ballots with unfamiliar systems lead to longer lines and, in the language of election administration, “less throughput.” All of that means less efficiency.

Then there’s the politics.

The 2010 court of appeals election was messy. Recently appointed incumbent Cressie Thigpen won the first round by more than 100,000 votes over the second-highest vote-getter, Doug McCullough. But after the second and third round votes were counted—a full six weeks later–McCullough emerged victorious.

Although it was officially a nonpartisan race, Thigpen was the Democratic favorite. McCullough was more popular among Republicans. Some Democrats responded to Thigpen’s second-round loss by questioning whether the ranked-choice voting system was to blame.

The News & Observer editorial page also expressed skepticism in the process, asking, “did all those second- and third-choice votes really get added up right?”

The Sunset and the Monster Bill

North Carolina’s experiment with ranked-choice voting went out not with a one-two punch, but rather a one-two whimper.

With Cary out and Hendersonville the lone pilot remaining, there wasn’t much political will to add other municipalities. As Cohen, who was the head of bill drafting for the General Assembly at the time, put it, “there was no constituency to extend it who has any power.”

Ranked-choice voting in North Carolina municipal elections faded into the sunset.

You had to look closely to identify the cause of death when it came to using the process for judicial vacancies. It was buried on page 46 of a 2013 bill known as H589, or “the monster bill” as some called it. That legislation added a photo ID requirement, eliminated same-day registration, reduced campaign finance disclosure requirements, and more. Putting the final nail in the coffin of ranked-choice voting was, by comparison, a minor detail.

Still, North Carolina is notable in the history of ranked-choice voting because it was both an early adopter and an early abandoner. But even the staunchest advocates don’t see much hope for revisiting the issue anytime soon.

Fisher, a co-sponsor of the original bill, chalked much of this up to an increasingly partisan electoral environment. “Mistrust and distrust took over the whole process…that put a stop to any kind of experimenting with the vote as it were—especially if the Democrats were in charge.”

Looking back, Rob Richie, the founder of FairVote, a prominent national ranked-choice advocacy organization, said North Carolina’s early experiment with the process is “viewed very much as an asterisk.” 

“A lot of people who work in the movement don’t know anything about it.” Richie explained.

And many of the lessons are cautionary. “It wasn’t a particularly smooth implementation,” Richie admitted. It’s the nature of “the trickiness of first wins.”

Nonetheless, he can’t help but think about the what-ifs. “If we had a couple of breaks. If 2010 hadn’t been close. If Cary hadn’t been a hand-count and a close election…” His voice trailed off before he turned to the present and future of the movement, which includes promising implementations in San Francisco, Maine, New York, Utah, and Alaska.

But not North Carolina. At least not right now.