Frequently Asked Questions

If Town Meeting passes this motion and if the state approves it as home rule legislation, all Lexington town elections after 1st January, 2025 will use Ranked Choice Voting.

Ensures majority support. Ranked Choice Voting prevents vote-splitting, so the winner of a single-seat race has a majority of the vote, and in multi-seat races the majority wins at least half the seats.

Encourages more candidates to run. To avoid splitting the vote, prospective candidates today are pressured to bow out before the race has even begun. This perpetuates “wait your turn” politics that discourages diverse and non-traditional candidates from throwing their hat in the ring.

Promotes diversity in multi-seat elections. Today, a slim majority of voters can control 100% of the seats in a multi-seat race. With RCV, minority groups can win seats in proportion to their vote share.

Limits gamesmanship. In our multi-seat elections today, campaigns quietly lobby voters to “bullet vote” for just one candidate. This gaming becomes ineffective under Ranked Choice Voting.

Discourages negative campaigning. Under Ranked Choice Voting, candidates have an incentive to reach out beyond their base, to pick up second and third choices from supporters of their opponents.

Filling out a ranked ballot has proven easy for voters in practice:

• Nearly all voters (95%) in the New York City’s 2021 primary elections found the ballot “simple to complete.” Most said they understood RCV “extremely” or “very” well.

• In 2022, 85% of Alaska voters reported that RCV is “simple” in their first RCV election.

• Nearly all (90%) Maine voters said their experience with RCV in the state’s June 2018 primary elections was “excellent” or “good.”

• 92% of voters in Minneapolis, which has used RCV since 2009, find it “simple.”

For a single seat election, ballots are counted in rounds until there are only two candidates left. In each round, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and those ballots are instantly counted for the next choice marked on each ballot. When there are only two choices remaining, the candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of the votes wins the seat.

In a multi-seat election, rather than requiring candidates to reach 50% of the vote, the threshold is lowered to allow more candidates to win and more voters to be represented. For n number of seats, the threshold is 1/(n+1), meaning 33% in a 2-seat race, 25% in a 3-seat race, and so on. Just like the single-seat case, if no candidate exceeds the threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped and those ballots count for their next choice instead. In addition, if a candidate receives more than enough votes to win, their surplus votes are counted for the next choice on their ballots. Read more details at FairVote.com.

No, voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, including just one.

No. To cast a valid RCV ballot, a voter needs only mark a valid first choice, which is just as easy as voting for a single candidate on a plurality ballot today. A thorough 2016 study researched this question and found no higher invalid ballot rates under RCV. In fact, the raw data from the study showed fewer invalid ballots under RCV, although the difference in invalid ballot rates wasn’t statistically significant.

Unlike our current system, there is no incentive to “bullet vote” under RCV. With RCV, your ballot will never count for your second choice until your first choice is either elected or eliminated, so there is no way for your second choice to affect the fate of your first choice. In our current multi-seat elections, there is a strategic incentive to “bullet vote,” which encourages gamesmanship. With RCV, It is still perfectly valid to rank only one candidate—that is a legitimate expression of one’s preference—but there would no longer be an incentive to do so as a voting strategy.

Skipped rankings are rare under RCV. When they do occur, the motion proposes to treat them as follows:

• When a voter skips a single ranking on a ballot, the skipped ranking is treated as if it were unintentional, and the candidate after the skipped ranking is treated as the voter’s next choice candidate. For example, if a voter ranks candidate A first, no one second, and C third, the ballot is treated as if it ranked A first and C second.

• If a voter skips more than one ranking, the skipped rankings are more likely intentional, but the voter’s specific intent is unclear. For that reason, every ranking after two or more skips is treated as if it were blank. For example, if a voter ranks A first, no one second or third, and D fourth, the ballot is treated as if it ranks A first and leaves the rest blank.

This treatment of skipped rankings is common to most RCV model legislation.

Today, 64 American jurisdictions use RCV, reaching approximately 13 million voters. This includes two states, two counties, and 60 cities and towns. In six states that require a runoff if needed to achieve a majority in federal elections, military and overseas voters cast ranked ballots in the initial election.

In Massachusetts, two cities, Cambridge and Easthampton, use RCV. Six additional cities and towns have submitted home rule petitions for RCV in the current legislative session. RCV is also in the draft charter of the City of Somerville, which the city plans to submit as home rule legislation by the end of the year.

Our new voting machines already support RCV and are used in RCV elections in other U.S. jurisdictions. However, the Town would need to purchase a software package from our vendor at a cost of approximately $12,500 with an annual recurring upgrade at a cost of $1,200. The software would help streamline the process of tabulating votes for state and federal elections, as well.

No, that doesn’t happen in practice, primarily because of how the election threshold works. It’s the entire reason the threshold exists. If your favorite candidate has more support than they need to be elected, the rest of your vote counts towards your next choice. Ranked Choice Voting takes the guesswork out of voting, so you can vote for the perceived front-runner first, and if they do win the first seat, then whatever portion of your vote the front-runner didn’t need to win counts towards your next choice.

In the context of US municipal elections, the research is too limited to say conclusively that RCV boosts turnout. Some studies find that RCV has a positive impact on turnout; some studies find no impact; and one author found a negative impact. Some international research suggests that adoption of alternative voting methods, particularly proportional methods, boosts turnout by 2 to 7 percentage points in elections over time. However, we do not claim that Lexington would see the same effect in local elections.

More than 50 academics around the state supported Question 2 for RCV in 2020. That list includes political scientists, professors of government, experts in election law and public policy, mathematicians, sociologists, economists (including one Nobel Laureate), and more. To our knowledge, Professor Hersh is the only professor statewide to have publicly opposed the question. For a detailed rebuttal of Professor Hersh’s claims see here.

Lexington's Home Rule Petition is drafted based on the language in similar petitions previously approved by Massachusetts cities and towns.  Proportional RCV for multiseat elections is part of the approved petitions of Acton, Amherst, Concord, Brookline, and Northampton; and is already in use in the City of Cambridge.

It is supported by the League of Women Voters, MassVOTE, Common Cause, Massachusetts Democratic Party, Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Coalition, Amplify LatinX, MassPIRG, RepresentUS, Sunrise Movement, Massachusetts Sierra Club, and many others.