The Beyond RCV Zine is printed on a 1/2 page of paper then folded in thirds. 

Is it time to think beyond RCV?

A zine from the Equal Vote Coalition 

Does RCV deliver?

Fair? Most rankings voters put down will never be counted. Rankings that could have made a difference may be ignored. (1)

Easy? Voter errors increase under RCV and honest behaviors like ranking candidates equally can void your ballot. (2)

Equitable? Low-income voters are more likely to cast voided ballots or have their vote not transfer as intended. (3)

No more voting lesser evil? RCV still has the spoiler effect if there are more than two viable candidates. It's not necessarily safe to rank your favorite first. (4)

Representative? Doesn't ensure a true majority winner. The candidate preferred over all others can be eliminated in the first round. (5) (6)

RCV In The Real World

Voter Errors: Voter errors rates triple under RCV. Low income voters are hardest hit. (7)

Centralized Tabulation: RCV's central tabulation requirement undermines election security and delays results. (8)

Mistallies: Tallying RCV is complex. Two jurisdictions have mistallied their elections and reported incorrect results. (9) (10)

Results Failures: At least three public RCV elections have failed to elect the candidate preferred over all others. (11)

Repeals and Bans: 16 states have banned RCV and 16 jurisdictions have repealed it (as of  April 2025). (12)

Constitutionality: RCV was found to be unconstitutional in Maine and faces serious constitutionality issues in most states. (13)

Comparing Single-Winner Methods

Go Vote: Demo and compare each of these voting methods at BetterVoting.com

Make your own Beyond RCV zines! 

You can download the Beyond RCV Zine Pdf here and print it full size. (Normal printers will cut off a bit of the black margin on the cover. That's fine!) Then cut in half using the cut line and fold it into thirds. "RCV in the Real World" should be your back cover. 

Citations: 

(1) Voting Systems and the Condorcet Paradox, PBS Infinite Series. 

(Note that this handout refers specifically to single-winner RCV, though many of the same concerns apply more broadly.)

(2) "Higher counts of overvotes were also found, at times, among San Francisco communities with more Latino residents (Neely and Cook 2008), something shown in a similar analysis of voters in Los Angeles (Sinclair and Alvarez 2004), and in areas with more foreignborn residents... What has not changed is the nature of the discrepancies in who tends to overvote: consistently, precincts where more African-Americans reside are more likely to collect overvoted, voided ballots. And this often occurs where more Latino, elderly, foreign-born, and less wealthy folks live."
Overvoting and the Equality of Voice under Instant-Runoff Voting in San Francisco, Francis Neely and Jason McDaniel San Francisco State University, The California Journal of Politics and Policy. 

(3) "The data show that in a typical ranked choice race, nearly 1 in 20 (4.8%) voters improperly mark their ballot in at least one way. We argue that these improper marks are consistent with voter confusion about their ranked ballot, and find evidence that this mismarking rate is higher in areas with more racial minorities, lower-income households, and lower levels of educational attainment. We further find that votes in ranked choice races are about 10 times more likely to be rejected due to an improper mark than votes in non-ranked choice races." Pettigrew, S., Radley, D. Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting. Political Behavior, Springer Nature (2025). 

(4) "The voting method is well-known to have many deficiencies which receive attention in the social choice literature. The deficiencies with which we are concerned are:

• RCV can fail to elect the Condorcet winner.
• RCV is susceptible to the spoiler effect.
• RCV is susceptible to downward and upward monotonicity paradoxes.
• RCV is susceptible to the truncation paradox, the most extreme version of which is the no-show paradox.
• RCV is susceptible to compromise strategic voting.
• RCV is not truly “majoritarian” because of ballot exhaustion.

The purpose of this article is to examine how often these issues occur in actual elections, where we focus on the single-winner case. To that end, we collected the ballot data for as many single-winner ranked-choice American political elections as we could, resulting in a database of 182 elections."
An Examination Of Ranked Choice Voting In The United States, 2004-2022 Adam Graham-Squire And David Mccune, ArXiv.

(5) "a reader might erroneously understand the words “[r]equires that candidate must receive majority of votes to win election” to mean that a candidate must receive the majority of votes cast." and "As the parties agree, the word “majority” in the caption does not mean the majority of votes cast; instead, under the ranked-choice voting process set out in LR 403, it means the majority of votes counted for active candidates in a final round of tallying." Sasinowski v. Legislative Assembly, Oregon Supreme Court, 2024. 

(6) RCV Changed Alaska, Arend Peter Castelein, Equal Vote Coalition 2024. 

(7) "The data show that in a typical ranked choice race, nearly 1 in 20 (4.8%) voters improperly mark their ballot in at least one way. We argue that these improper marks are consistent with voter confusion about their ranked ballot, and find evidence that this mismarking rate is higher in areas with more racial minorities, lower-income households, and lower levels of educational attainment. We further find that votes in ranked choice races are about 10 times more likely to be rejected due to an improper mark than votes in non-ranked choice races."
"Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting", Political Behavior, 12/20/2023 Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley, University of Pennsylvania.

(8) "A voting unit or precinct tabulating unit cannot perform RCV tabulation. RCV tabulation requires the concurrent availability of all CVRs [cast vote records] associated with an RCV contest and is a post-voting accumulation/aggregation process."
Voluntary Voting System Guidelines VVSG 2.0

(9) "More than 50 days after the November election and days before winners take office, Alameda County election officials announce that a programming error led to a miscount across all ranked-choice contests, including a race in which an Oakland school board candidate was wrongly declared the winner. The revelation came well after the county certified the results and raised questions not only about what happens next, but whether the mistake could further erode faith in fair elections."
"Alameda County admits tallying error in ranked-choice voting, flips one result and raises big questions" San Francisco Chronicle, 12/28/2022. (See Appendix 1 below.) 

(10) "Then, around 10:30pm, the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test it's ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted "both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records [ballots]," the statement said. The ranked-choice number, it said, would be tabulated again."
"New York Mayor's Race in Chaos After Elections Board Counts 135,000 Test Ballots." The New York Times, 6/29/2021 (See Appendix 2 below.) 

(11) "Results Failures – At least 3 public RCV elections have failed to elect the candidate preferred over all others:"

• Alaska House Special Election, Aug. 2022. The candidate preferred over all others lost. The two Republicans split the vote and the seat flipped Democratic for the first time.
• Burlington, Vermont, 2009. The candidate preferred over all others lost.
• Moab, Utah, 2021. The candidate preferred over all others lost the first seat, though the election was multi-winner."

Real World RCV Failures, Equal Vote Coalition. (See Appendix 3 below.)

(12) "As of March 2025, the following 39 localities stopped using RCV after using it in past local elections." (Note that this article Ballotpedia refers to both single-winner RCV and Single Transferable Vote, ie Proportional RCV, as RCV while this handout refers specifically to single-winner RCV.)
Ranked-choice voting (RCV), Ballotpedia. 

(13) In 2023, the Equal Vote Coalition completed a comprehensive review of all 50 states' constitutions to identify election law statutes which could be used to rule a state's voting method unconstitutional for some or all races within that state. We identified the six most common rules which could, in our opinion, disqualify a voting method: The Vote for One Rule, Plurality Winner Rule, Count All Votes Rule, Batch Sum Rule, Hand Count Rule, and the Equal Vote Rule. Legal precedents are documented where available. 
Voting Methods Constitutional Compliance Checklist and Spreadsheet, Equal Vote Coalition. (See Appendix 4 below.) 

Note on citations: There is widespread misinformation on voting methods in circulation, including from sources that are generally considered reputable. The practice of circular citation, in which affiliated and mission aligned groups link to each other without ever linking to primary sources or employing first principles logic has created an electoral reform landscape posed to do serious harm by misrepresenting critical information needed for informed voter consent. For this reason, the Equal Vote Coalition only cites sources which we have independently verified as accurate to the best of our ability. 

Appendices:

Appendix 1. 

Appendix 2. 

Appendix 3.

Appendix 4: