2024 is the release party for Ranked Voting. But not everyone wants to celebrate.

Voters in four states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday will have the opportunity to adopt ranked-choice voting through the ballot, setting the stage for a potentially massive expansion of an alternative voting system in which voters rank candidates rather than simply choosing the top option.

On Tuesday, voters in Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and the District of Columbia will decide whether to adopt the system. The dominant political parties in each region have fought against the adoption of ranked-choice voting, which is already used in Alaska, Maine and several municipalities across the country, including New York and San Francisco.

With ranked choice, voters indicate who will be their first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on on the ballot. If no one receives a majority of first-place votes, the votes are recounted: the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and that eliminated candidate’s second choice votes are added to the remaining candidates’ tallies. This continues until the candidate receives a majority of votes.

It’s touted as a way to avoid extremism and give voters more than just a binary choice between a bad candidate and a worse one. But this is also controversial.

Alaska is voting this year to eliminate ranked-choice voting, which it first used in statewide elections in 2022. And in Missouri, language banning ranked-choice voting is part of a proposed constitutional amendment on the GOP ballot. – dominates the state legislature.

Some studies suggest that some of the proposed benefits of ranked-choice voting, such as better candidate quality and a more diverse pool of candidates, have been overestimated.

A 2024 study by NYU assistant professor of data science Jonathan Colner found only a temporary effect in 47 cities in 13 states that use ranked choice for local elections.

“Although there is an initial increase in applicant numbers following the introduction of RCV, this effect quickly dissipates. Moreover, the candidates who make up this initial crop tend to be of poor quality,” he wrote.

The change also did little to diversify the candidate pool in terms of race or gender, he said.

“Instead, RCV appears to be disrupting the local political environment by encouraging a temporary increase in the number of candidates before becoming part of the status quo.”

Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonprofit that supports ranked-choice voting, disagreed.

“The idea is that ranked choice voting gives voters the best choices, the best campaigns and the winners with the most votes,” rather than the victory going to someone with just a few votes, she said.

It also prevents independent candidates from being seen solely as spoilers for major party rivals.

“When you have a third-party or independent candidate running, voters are told that the candidate might be a spoiler, or that they might be wasting their vote if they don’t vote for the leader,” she said.

“It puts voters in a really difficult position and forces political parties to do really strange things, like support independents or third-party candidates on the other side to try to help their side.”

Despite the apparent complexity ranked choice adds to voting, Otis said voters are accustomed to ranking things, not candidates.

“I have a list of my favorite dishes, and if the item I want is sold out, I will order a second option. I won’t go home hungry. I know what my second choice is,” she said.

However, according to critics of ranked-choice voting, it’s not that simple.

The issue has split Colorado’s Senate delegation. Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), despite sponsoring a bill making it easier to implement ranked-choice voting for state and local governments, opposed Proposition 131, the state’s RCV referendum. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Gov. Jared Polis are in favor.

“I have already said that ranked-choice voting in one form or another can have a positive effect in some elections. However, ranked-choice voting is a new phenomenon and comes in many forms. “I’m not sure the untested, extreme version we were asked to consider would work in Colorado or anywhere else,” Bennett said in a statement.

Bennett also said RCV could expand its outreach to major donors, citing the campaign for Proposition 131.

“We have been bombarded with a one-sided barrage of millions of dollars worth of television advertising designed to convince us to abandon our current world-class electoral system for an untested experiment,” he said.

The proposal would create an open primary system in which the top four candidates in the regular vote would advance to the general election, regardless of party. Voters then ranked the remaining four names.

Over the past 20 years, Colorado has become increasingly Democratic. But the state GOP does not see ranked-choice voting as a tool to help it break that power and is also urging voters to reject the change. The state Republican Party has said it will help elect liberal Democrats and is being pushed by people “whose goal is to eliminate parties and move to a centrist system.”

A Democratic official familiar with state politics told HuffPost the proposal faces rare bipartisan opposition, with the state Democratic Party also opposing it.

“Listen, the Colorado Republican Party is crazy,” the operative said. “But they wouldn’t say we need to turn our system upside down just because they can’t get their act together.”

In the District of Columbia, where voter registration is overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats, the local Democratic Party also opposes the ranked-choice voting initiative. The D.C. initiative would also allow independents to vote in taxpayer-funded primaries of either party, which is currently prohibited.

“Giving non-democrats the right to vote in democratic elections will dilute the values ​​and goals of our party. “Rank choice voting and semi-closed primaries could compromise the integrity of our party, potentially resulting in candidates who do not fully align with our core values,” the party’s website states.

FairVote’s Otis said RCV could actually make parties more competitive by allowing less ideological candidates to emerge. She pointed to Glenn Yankin, the Republican governor of Virginia, who was selected as a candidate in the RCV primary.

“The party ran the most competitive ticket in years and won the governorship” in a Democratic state, she said.

Concerns about big money and its role in boosting ranked-choice voting are harder to address.

Of the two major campaign committees vying for Proposition 131, the pro-RCV group significantly outperformed its opposition counterpart, from $14.3 million to just $284,540 by mid-October, according to state campaign finance data.

In fact, in the final days of October, Kent Thiry, the former CEO of dialysis giant DaVita, was reported to have donated $1.45 million to the “yes” campaign in two separate donations. Thiry has promoted previous changes in state elections and is part of a larger group of people who have spent more than $50 million on RCV efforts in Colorado and other states, according to a Colorado Public Radio analysis.

Curtis Hubbard, a Democratic Party political consultant and spokesman for the Pro-131 campaign, said the nearly 213,000 signatures collected to put RCV on the ballot, as well as the ideological diversity of the elected politicians who support it, show it is in fact broadly popular. .

“We have built a broad and diverse coalition of people from across the political spectrum in Colorado who are passionate about giving voters more and better choices,” Hubbard said.