Candidates running for a municipal office in 23 Utah cities had a lot of explaining to do this year.

In addition to discussing their stand on the issues, they had to describe how ranked-choice voting works. The system of ranking candidates by preference on ballots was new to most voters and office seekers usually had to include a tutorial on it along with their campaign message.

That made for some difficulty for candidates and the voters they were trying to reach.

“Nobody was familiar with ranked-choice voting and I spent a great deal of campaign time explaining it to them and it still didn’t do much good,” businessman Jim Bennett, a candidate for Sandy mayor, said. 

But Taylor Williams, Utah County chief deputy clerk/auditor, noted that a recent survey showed most Utahns found the ranked-choice voting easy to use and the instructions on how to fill out a ballot clear. 

“When there’s change, people are always going to have a level of confusion and a level of hesitancy,” Williams said. “There’s a continual education process that needs to take place.”

Under the ranked-choice voting system, which sometimes is called instant runoff voting, voters can rank all candidates by preference on their ballots, marking their first choice and their second choice and so on.

Voters are not required to rank candidates or rank all of them if they do. They can pick just their first choice or stop listing preferences at any point.

If a voter skips a ranking, any choices after that will not be counted. Ranking one candidate more than once – for example, as first, second and third choice – does not bring any benefit and is the same as leaving the second and third preference columns blank. 

A candidate who wins more than 50% of the first-preference votes is declared the winner. 

If no one crosses that threshold in the first tally, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated. The votes that were cast for the eliminated candidate then go the next highest ranked candidate on the ballots.

“When there’s change, people are always going to have a level of confusion and a level of hesitancy.”

Taylor Williams, Utah County chief deputy clerk/auditor

If no candidate tops the 50% mark after the votes are tabulated again, the process is repeated. The lowest vote getter is eliminated and the next-choice votes of that candidate’s supporters are added to the tallies of the remaining candidates until someone wins a majority.

In a traditional winner-take-all election, a candidate can win with a plurality of the vote. In a ranked choice contest, the winner must get more than half of the votes.

The Utah cities that used ranked-choice voting did not hold primaries. 

“Skipping the entire cost of an election and still administering the election in a very fair way obviously resonates with a lot of Utah County voters,” Williams said.

Creating a more positive tone in campaigns 

The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center says that jurisdictions adopt the procedure to save money and increase civility in campaigns. In places without ranked-choice voting, the top two candidates must campaign in a run-off election and voters must return to the polls again, the center says on its website (https://www.rcvresources.org/).

Turnout often plummets in the second round and a head-to-head race can get negative, according to the center.

“In non-ranked-choice voting elections, candidates often turn to mud-slinging by attacking an opponent’s character instead of sharing their positive vision with voters,” the website says. “With ranked-choice voting, candidates do best when they reach out positively to as many voters as possible, including those supporting their opponents.”

FairVote (https://www.fairvote.org/research_rcvcampaigncivility) reports that studies show voters perceive a more positive tone in campaigns and less negative campaigning in ranked-choice voting elections. 

The voting system was introduced to Utah’s Republican and Democratic parties and the caucuses and conventions where it was used were shorter because delegates and neighbors had to vote only once, according to Utah Ranked Choice Voting (https://utahrcv.com).

The Utah Legislature passed a pilot program in 2018 that allowed municipalities to adopt ranked choice voting and the next year, Vineyard and Payson became the first two cities in the state to use it. In 2021, 23 cities decided to opt in. 

This year’s participating governments in Salt Lake County (https://slco.org/contentassets/afb06c405a5946b4ab0fb6bafa5f0a49/rankedchoiceresults.pdf) were Bluffdale, Cottonwood Heights, Draper, Midvale, Millcreek, Riverton, Salt Lake City, Sandy, South Salt Lake and Magna Metro Township.

In Utah County (https://www.utahcounty.gov/Dept/ClerkAud/Elections/2021RankedResults.asp), Elk Ridge, Genola, Goshen, Lehi, Payson, Springville, Vineyard and Woodland Hills decided to use ranked-choice voting. 

The other cities were Nibley, Newton and River Heights in Cache County; Moab in Grand County; and Heber in Wasatch County.

Some races were decided after the first or second round. Others took longer. 

“With ranked-choice voting, candidates do best when they reach out positively to as many voters as possible, including those supporting their opponents.”

Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center

Sandy’s mayoral contest went through seven rounds of counting before Sandy City Council member Monica Zoltanski emerged from the field of eight candidates as the winner. The final count was Zoltanski with 8,620 votes, which was 50.1% of the total, and Bennett with 8,599 votes, or 49.9%.

Making every vote count 

Stan Lockhart, of Utah Ranked Choice Voting, said the system allows a greater expression of voter will at the polls. With plurality voting, people who prefer a candidate who has no chance of getting elected often cast their ballot strategically for someone who appears to have a better chance of winning, he said.

But with ranked-choice voting, voters can put their preferred choice first and pick a more mainstream candidate second “and that vote will still count toward the end,” Lockhart said.

“Then the candidate with the broadest and the deepest support will get elected,” he said. “Isn’t that what we want?”

In addition, with ranked-choice voting there are no games like the ones in plurality elections, Lockhart said. In a multi-winner race, such as one with several at-large seats, there is a statistical advantage for candidates if their supporters vote only for them but there’s no such benefit in a ranked-choice election, he said.

“In another game – not so much in Utah but around the country – you’ll have candidates who actually recruit other candidates to run against them to take away votes from the candidate that has the best chance of beating them,” Lockhart said.

For example, a Democrat running against a strong Republican might recruit a Libertarian to run as a way to sift votes away from the opponent and a Republican might look for a Green Party candidate to join the race, he said.

Lockhart said polls show that before an election, a large group of voters are skeptical about the system but afterward, most of those same people are in favor of it.

A survey by Utah Ranked Choice Voting and Y2 Analytics of 1,995 Utah voters – 1,471 residents of cities that used ranked choice and 524 who live in non-ranked choice municipalities – showed 81% who voted in an election that allowed them to list their preferences found the method very easy or somewhat easy to use and 90% said the instructions on how to fill out the ballot were very clear or somewhat clear. 

“The candidate with the broadest and the deepest support will get elected. Isn’t that what we want?”

Stan Lockhart, Utah Ranked Choice Voting

Of these voters, 62% said they liked using a ranked-choice ballot a great deal or somewhat and 60% were much more or somewhat more likely to vote for their favorite candidate in an election. 

No matter which type of ballot the respondents used, approximately 65% of each group said they were very satisfied with their voting experience in the 2021 municipal elections.

The margin of error in the survey was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Challenges and rewards of listing preferences 

Some candidates said ranked-choice voting made running for office more of a challenge in 2021. 

Sandy mayoral candidate Brooke Christensen said most people didn’t know about ranked-choice voting and when she explained what it is, many were still confused or opposed to using the system.

“People want one vote,” she said.

A downside of ranked-choice voting is that candidates don’t express solid opinions to avoid alienating anyone who might rank them as a second or third choice, Christensen said. And with eight candidates running for mayor, voters didn’t have time to research all of them, she said.

Christensen said she would have preferred having a primary because when the field is narrowed to the final two candidates in the general election, voters know the difference between them. Instead, people had to select a favorite for mayor from among eight candidates.

“It affects your strategy,” Christensen of ranked-choice voting. “It affects your fund-raising ability. How do you differentiate yourself in such a large field?”

Polling also was hard because more than half the voters were still undecided two or three weeks before the election about who they were going to vote for, she said.

Bennett said running for office in a ranked-choice election cost him more than expected because he was campaigning against seven other contenders from spring until November, instead of until August, when primaries were held in cities having traditional elections.

Another candidate for mayor, Mike Applegarth, who is the Sandy City Council executive director, said he liked not having a primary because of the cost savings and the opportunity to campaign longer. 

In addition, he said ranked-choice voting encourages more people to run for office. 

“As a candidate, it’s nice to have that time to reach out to voters and feel like you can legitimately compete until the end,” Applegarth said. “I really saw RCV as a way to broaden people’s choices.”

Campaigning and explaining

In Draper, where all City Council seats are at-large, seven candidates were vying for two spots and, in the end, incumbents Tasha Lowery and Mike Green won re-election. 

In Round 6, Lowery reached 4,723 votes, equaling 58.1% of the total, and the other remaining candidate, Hubert Huh, had 3,410 votes, or 41.9%. After Lowery won the first seat, more rounds of tallies were conducted for the second at-large seat and the votes distributed among the six other candidates. The final result was 3,986 votes, or 50.8% of the total, for Green and 3,867, or 49.2%, for Huh.

Huh – who had a video on YouTube that promoted his candidacy and explained ranked-choice voting – said people were unfamiliar with the method, which made campaigning harder. 

He talked to voters about how the system worked but sometimes they didn’t understand it and no one liked it, Huh said. 

“Not being an incumbent, I had to work hard to promote my name so I paid less attention to explaining ranked-choice voting,” Huh said.

Lowery said she liked the idea of making elections more affordable for both the city and the candidates and appreciated the longer break from politics provided by not having a primary. However, ranked-choice voting was confusing at first, she said.

“It was difficult to both campaign and explain a new system simultaneously,” she said. “I was sorry to see some residents choose not to participate because of the change, but there were also some who felt that they were better able to vote for the candidates they truly supported.”

Except for explaining the ranked-choice voting procedure, Lowery said she conducted her campaign this year in the same way she did in the past – knocking on thousands of doors, making more than 10,000 phone calls, sending mailers and passing out more than 500 yard signs.

Green said having to describe ranked-choice voting and show how to mark a ballot was an obstacle when he was trying to talk about campaign issues. He asked voters to rank him as their  first or second choice. 

“It was difficult to both campaign and explain a new system simultaneously.”

Draper City Council member Tasha Lowery

“It put me in a really hard situation campaigning,” Green said, adding that he did not like the added element of having to explain candidate ranking but that he is not against the voting method.

A big positive was that the candidates with the most votes and the broadest support win, he said.

“I think the first time I won, I won with 26 percent of the vote,” Green said. “Now, I won with 51 percent of the vote.”

Draper is planning to conduct a survey to see what voters think about ranked-choice voting and whether they want to continuing using it.