Does Indiana need more complicated, confusing elections? The average voter would likely say “probably not,” which is why both chambers of the Indiana Legislature recently passed Senate Bill 12. This legislation would align Indiana with a national trend: just last year, six states passed similar bans on Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to protect the integrity of their elections. That brought the total number of states banning RCV to 17. If this momentum continues, RCV may soon be outlawed in half of the United States.
In a normal election, we vote for one candidate for each office. That is simple for voters and for those who count and report results. With RCV, though, voters rank multiple candidates for each office. First-place rankings are counted, and if no candidate has a majority, then the least popular candidate is eliminated and any second-place rankings on those ballots are “moved up” to count in the next round. If all of a voter’s rankings are eliminated, his or her ballot is no longer counted. These rounds of counting, adjusting, discarding ballots, and recounting continue until a candidate has a majority of the remaining votes.
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project and co-chair of the Stop RCV coalition, urged senators to advance S.B. 12 at a Senate committee hearing late last month;reminding them of RCV’s long track record of delaying election results, eliminating valid ballots, and creating longer lines at the polls.
Indiana isn’t the only state moving in this direction right now. An RCV ban passed the Ohio Senate last year and is expected to pass the Ohio House soon. A ballot measure to repeal RCV in Alaska, one of only two states to use it for most elections, recently qualified for the 2026 ballot. This follows a previous repeal vote that fell short by a razor-thin margin in 2024. To say the least, 2026 is shaping up to be a difficult year for ranked-choice voting activists and an expensive one for its donors.
Supporters of the system point to the fact that no Indiana municipality currently uses RCV as a reason to reject the bill, but that’s a moot point. It’s vital that states act now to prevent RCV from gaining a foothold. Advocates typically start at the local level, pushing ballot measures in cities or counties to spread the system – a strategy that has proven successful in the past.
Pro-RCV groups have been able to impose their election scheme on millions of Americans through local and state ballot measures. Their efforts are the reason Maine Congressional District 2 has experienced delays every election cycle since adopting the system. It’s why an Alameda County, California, school board race was thrown into chaos after a technical glitch caused the wrong winner to be sworn in. The issue was eventually solved after an outside firm conducted a painstaking audit and a judge ordered the county to declare the correct winner.
An often-overlooked benefit of banning ranked-choice voting is that it saves taxpayers money. Municipalities are forced to spend on voting machine upgrades and retraining just to implement the system. On top of that, continuous, expensive, and ineffective voter education campaigns become a permanent fixture in elections. Perhaps the best example is New York City, which spent $15 million on its voter education campaign in 2021. Even with all that, over 140,000 ballots were eliminated during that year’s Democratic mayoral primary.
These public funds are often distributed as grants to pro-RCV groups like FairVote, giving these left-wing election groups the legitimacy needed to push the system onto other municipalities.
Whether it’s used in a school board election in Alameda County, a mayoral primary in New York City, or a congressional race in Maine, voters have suffered the negative effects of RCV. The system has led to technical glitches, long and difficult audits, weeks-long delays, and ballot elimination. It’s clear that RCV is a mess in local, statewide, and federal elections. The Indiana Legislature is right to ban it, and voters are wise to oppose it.
