Ohio House lawmakers have approved a measure aimed at banning ranked choice voting. Under the bill, no state election may be conducted with ranked choice and any local government that decides to use a ranked choice system would forfeit state dollars.
Ohio Senate Bill 63 passed the state Senate last May with bipartisan support. The 63-27 vote in state House drew the backing of two Democrats — Ohio state Reps. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown, and Daniel Troy, D-Willowick. The measure leverages the Local Government Fund, a critical source of revenue for counties and cities around the state, to warn off local ranked choice efforts.
In written statement before the floor vote, Rank the Vote Ohio Executive Director Denise Riley said threatening local funding amounts to coercion. And she expressed disappointment that lawmakers banned the practice when no municipality in the state is actually using it yet. Two cities, Lakewood and Cleveland Heights, have been considering whether to put the practice on the ballot.
As a general matter, Riley argued transferring voters’ support in a ranked choice system “fixes a lot of problems.”
“No more spoilers. No more “wasted votes.” And it encourages positive campaigns, according to the American Bar Association Task Force for American Democracy.”
House lawmakers tacked on an amendment clarifying the petition papers a political candidate submits to make the ballot are a public record. The bill now returns to the Senate.
Floor debate
Ohio state Rep. Sharon Ray, R-Wadsworth, warned ranked choice voting “presents significant implementation problems.”
The approach gives voters the option to select multiple candidates for a single office in order of their preference. Under a typical system, the lowest performing candidate gets eliminated in successive rounds. But if the voters who backed that eliminated candidate have additional candidates listed on their ballot, their vote gets transferred to their next choice in the following round.
Ray, who previously served on the Medina County Board of Elections, pointed to warnings from the Ohio secretary of state.
“While some voting machines might be able to accept the software update needed to tabulate grant choice voting, the update would be significant and costly,” Ray said. “Boards of elections that have older machines would most likely have to be replaced.”
Ohio state Rep. Ron Ferguson, R-Wintersville, warned ranked choice tabulation can take days or even weeks, and offered a tortured defense of the “one person, one vote” principle.
“We aren’t voting for three or four or five people. We’re voting for one person,” he said. “That’s the foundation of this republic.”
Although ranked choice systems allow a voter’s preference to be reflected in multiple rounds of tabulation, that voter still only gets one vote.
Rep. Adam Bird pointed to research suggesting ranked choice doesn’t reduce political polarization and might dilute minority voter representation. He added the public education campaign that would be needed for a new ranked choice system could be expensive.
More than anything, though, he voiced frustration with the idea of transferring votes.
“I can point to Alaska,” he said. “This happened in 2022, where there were three candidates, the two Republican candidates got 60 to 70% of the vote. But yet, after the process is implemented, the Democrat wins that.”
“In Maine in 2018,” Bird continued, “the Republican wins the first round but gets less than 50% of the vote because of the presence of two independents in the process. And so after you have exhausted ballots, you end up with a Democrat who wins that.”
It’s true that in Maine, a Republican got a plurality in the first round, and in successive rounds, the Democrat pulled ahead. But that cuts against Bird’s argument in Alaska.
The 2022 election cycle was closely watched because former Republican nominee for Vice President Sarah Palin decided to run in a special election for the U.S. House. If Bird was referring to that race, it’s true that the GOP candidates combined got a majority of votes in the first round, but the Democrat, former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola got the most votes of any candidate. In successive rounds, her margins grew until she cleared 50%.
When she ran again in that year’s general election, Peltola won again and actually improved on her margins.
Pushback
The only lawmaker to speak out against the proposal was Ohio state Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey, D-Cincinnati. She argued the version of ranked choice Cincinnati used for local elections from 1925 to 1957 helped boost minority representation.
“This system reduced the domination of a single political machine and made Council representation more proportional,” Bryant Bailey said. “Under that system, African American candidates began being elected to council.”
One beneficiary was Ted Berry, who went on to become Cincinnati’s first Black mayor, Bryant Bailey explained.
She pushed back on Bird’s research, explaining she’d seen plenty of peer-reviewed studies demonstrating minorities do just fine, and maybe even participate at higher rates, under ranked choice.
“We all can find something to validate our plans,” Bryant Bailey said.
She concluded by explaining she’s not advocating for a ranked choice system and that she didn’t believe the debate was actually about ranked choice.
“This bill is not about protecting voters. It’s about control,” she said. “What this bill does is effectively ban ranked choice, but more than that, it tells our cities and our voters that we do not trust them to govern themselves.”
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.