THE OPTIONS: 3 VOTING SYSTEMS UNDER CONSIDERATION IN OREGON

Our Current Voting System, known as Plurality or First Past The Post, is used in the vast majority of the USA and many places around the world. Each person votes for one candidate only. The candidate with the most votes wins. (Factors like the electoral college complicate the process but you get the idea.)

STAR Voting is a new proposed system where voters use a 5 star ballot to give each candidate a score from 0-5 to show their preferences. The two highest scoring candidates are finalists. The finalist that was preferred by more voters wins.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) aka Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) is the most common method for counting ranked ballots. Voters rank candidates in order of preference: 1st, 2nd, 3rd and sometimes more. If a candidate has a majority of first choice votes, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated. If your first choice is eliminated, your vote goes to your next choice if possible, and the process repeats in rounds until one candidate has a majority.

HONESTY - Encourages and rewards honest voting:

Current System: Only voters who prefer the front-runners should vote honestly. Since barely half of voters in the US are actually registered major party this is a fail. (1.) Many voters have to be strategically dishonest to optimize their vote because honest voting can backfire. GRADE: F

STAR Voting: With STAR Voting you can and should vote honestly and vote your conscience. Dishonest voting strategies are largely ineffective and likely to backfire. GRADE: A

RCV: Most voters can safely vote honestly, but for some it’s not safe to rank your favorite first. If your favorite is pretty strong but you're not sure they can win you might be better off marking a front-runner as your first choice. You can always vote your conscience if there are only 2 viable candidates but the more viable candidates there are, the more you should consider voting strategically. GRADE: B

EQUALITY – Fair, equal, and impartial. Doesn't give anyone an unfair advantage.

Current System- Two similar candidates can split supporters between them and both lose, even if one or both had support from a majority.  Because of vote splitting any voter who likes more than one candidate is at a huge disadvantage as is any candidate who is similar to their opponent. Furthermore, closed partisan primaries further disadvantage 3rd parties and candidates who are not incumbents or deemed “electable”. GRADE: D

STAR Voting- STAR Voting eliminates vote splitting by allowing voters to support multiple candidates, and then counting all that ballot data at once. This gives each voter a mathematically equally weighted vote. Any way I fill out my ballot you can fill yours out in an equal and opposite fashion so that our votes cancel each other out. This is one of the few systems that doesn’t give some voters or candidates an unfair advantage.  GRADE: A+

RCV- The ranked ballot is somewhat more fair than our current system because it mitigates vote splitting but in RCV not all those rankings are actually counted. Advocates say that in RCV if your first choice is eliminated, your next choice will be counted, but for many voters this isn't true. It depends on the order that your candidates are eliminated in. By the time your first choice is eliminated your 2nd and 3rd choices may already be gone. This means that some voters get more say than others. Not fair and not equal. GRADE: C

ACCURACY – The candidate that best represents the electorate wins:

Current System- Plurality is the least accurate voting system out there. It only gives accurate results if there are 2 candidates in the race and even then it's likely that those candidates don't represent everyone. Elections often fail to elect the candidate with the most support and there is a high danger of vote splitting, i.e. The Spoiler Effect. This drives dishonest voting, which is an even bigger threat to accurate results. GRADE: D

STAR Voting- STAR Voting gives the most accurate, representative results of any voting system tested when voters are honest. Even if voters are dishonest and strategic, Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (2.) simulations show that results are still significantly more accurate than the other methods described here. STAR Voting picks the candidate that best represents the will of the electorate. GRADE: A

RCV- RCV is about ½ way between STAR Voting and our current system in terms of accuracy. It gives accurate results for elections with only 2 viable candidates, but can fail to elect the candidate who was preferred over all others in up to 1 in 5 elections or worse when there are more candidates according to expert analysis. (3.) GRADE: C

SIMPLICITY - User friendly for voters and elections officials.

Current System-This is about as simple as it gets in theory, although the need for strategic voting can make it hard to decide who to vote for, even if you know who you like. A primary and then a general election are needed. GRADE: B

STAR Voting- 5 star ratings are very intuitive. Explaining how the scores are counted is pretty simple but understanding how the runoff works and the implications takes thinking it through. A primary is unnecessary and tabulation only takes two rounds. STAR Voting uses a simple enough algorithm that hand recounts can be done and basic addition is all that’s required. STAR is user friendly for elections officials because it’s precinct summable. GRADE: B

RCV- Ranking candidates is intuitive, voters only need to vote once, and there’s usually no primary, but understanding how candidates are eliminated can get quite complicated if you look at the details. The multiple tournament style runoff rounds require an algebraic algorithm to tabulate. Understanding the election results can also be challenging as the order of elimination doesn’t always match who had more support. Ballots can't be processed locally and must be tabulated in a central location which can be a huge logistical challenge. Hand recounts are difficult, especially on larger scales. GRADE: C

EXPRESSIVENESS - Voters can express their full opinion

Current System- Because we can only vote for or support one candidate, this is the least expressive system possible. At least we get a vote. GRADE: D

STAR Voting- Voters give each candidate a score from 0 through 5 and can show how much they like each candidate as well as who they prefer to who. If they don’t have a preference voters can give the candidates the same scores. All the info you give on your ballot will be counted. GRADE: A

RCV- Voters can rank 3 or more candidates but you are unable to show ties or show how much you actually like each. Not all the rankings you give will be counted, depending on the elimination process. GRADE: B

VIABILITY - Has a good chance of being passed and not being repealed:

Current System- Plurality, aka First-Past-The-Post is the most used election system in the world but it is extremely unpopular! Many people are trying to repeal and replace it with something better and many have succeed. Now that we have technology to help count ballots there’s no reason to have an unrepresentative and archaic voting system. It should be illegal. GRADE: D

STAR Voting- STAR Voting is the new and improved hybrid of RCV and Score Voting. It hasn't been adopted for governmental elections yet, but analysis is very promising and all available evidence shows that it will outperform the voting systems in use currently. Most voting machines would need a software upgrade and the code and programing is simple and doable. Many state constitutions require a “win by plurality” which STAR offers. The fact that STAR Voting has perfectly equally weighted votes could make it the gold standard for one-person-one-vote. These two things make STAR Voting widely constitutionally viable. Precinct summability means that STAR Voting scales well and is a viable option for national elections.  GRADE: B

RCV- RCV is used by countries like Australia and Ireland and in cities around the US. It was recently passed by Maine and also in Corvallis, OR. and it has some momentum. RCV was recently repealed in Burlington, Vermont and four other cities (4.), in part because of it's problems with the spoiler effect, logistical challenges with the complex algorithm, and non-precinct summability. Failed election reform is arguably worse than none at all because it makes it harder to implement future reforms in those places. Another concern is that widespread misconceptions about RCV make it a bad stepping stone reform: Many people falsely believe and state that it is safe to vote your conscience, that if your favorite is eliminated your next choice will be counted, and that it solves the spoiler effect, even though these claims are false. RCV consistently advertises more than it delivers. RCV is unconstitutional in many places because of rules around win by plurality one-person-one-vote.  GRADE: C

SOURCES:

(1.) “29% of voters were registered Dem. and 26% Rep. at the beginning of the last election cycle with 42% Ind.” Democratic, Republican Identification Near Historical Lows. http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification-near-historical-lows.aspx

(2.) VSE-Sim. Voter Satisfaction Efficiency, or VSE, is a measure of the accuracy of a election method which uses thousands of simulated elections with honest and strategic voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way. http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

(3.) “[IRV] can cause spoilers in up to 1 in 5 elections or worse when there are more candidates according to expert analysis.” Frequency of monotonicity failure under Instant Runoff Voting: Estimates based on a spatial model of elections. By Joseph T Ornstein, University of Michigan, Dept. of Political Science and Robert Z. Norman, Dartmouth College, Dept. of Mathematics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258164743_Frequency_of_monotonicity_failure_under_Instant_Runoff_Voting_Estimates_based_on_a_spatial_model_of_elections

(4.) “STV/IRV was used in roughly two dozen US cities in the early 1900’s and repealed in all of them except for Cambridge, MA. In the modern era it was repealed in Ann Arbor, MI in 1976, then these four places in the past decade: Burlington, Vermont. Cary, North Carolina. Pierce County, Washington. Aspen, Colorado.”- Clay Shentrup, co-founder of the Center For Election Science

This blog post was originally written by Sara Wolk as part of the Portland chapter of RCV-OR's analysis of voting systems.

Written February 2017. Last Edited 6/24/25.

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 increase tenfold 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: 17 states have banned RCV and 17 jurisdictions have repealed it (as of September 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! Professional printers should be set to print full bleed.) Cut in half using the solid grey cut line and fold it into thirds using the grey dashed line and the edge of the black section from the cover as a guide. 

Citations: 

(1) Voting Systems and the Condorcet Paradox, PBS Infinite Series. , Let's go through a RCV election, Sass

(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 foreign born 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. 

Learn More:

Learn more about RCV here at BeyondRCV. 

Appendices:

Appendix 1. 

Appendix 2. 

Appendix 3.

Appendix 4:

Strategic STAR Voting?

In elections, Strategic Voting, also known as tactical or insincere voting, occurs when some voters cast ballots that do not reflect their sincere preferences in the hope that such a vote will obtain a better outcome. Because The Equal Vote Coalition promotes Honesty as among our core criteria for voting method efficacy, a look at what strategic incentives are created by various voting methods is key to determining their viability for contested public elections. Stated again, the first of our five voting method criteria is defined as follows:

Honesty: Can the voter safely express her honest opinion on the ballot, and to what level does the system incentivize  insincere strategic voting?

There are four distinct types of insincere voting that are possible in rated and ranked voting systems:

Strong Insincerity

A choice is strongly insincere if the voter offers a higher level of support to at least one candidate than that offered to his or her most preferred candidate. In keeping with the seriousness of this offense, the authors of this paper call it "decapitation"; other sources call it "compromising." In more modern parlance, this is known as Favorite Betrayal.

The incentive for strong insincerity is among the very critical defects of our current "support only one" voting method. If your true favorite candidate is not one of the two front-runners in the election, there is a strong incentive to tactically support the one of those two the voter finds least distasteful (i.e. the "lesser evil") rather than "wasting the vote" on a "spoiler" candidate.

Despite the claims of the method's advocates, strong insincerity can also be incentivized under RCV/IRV. The following video demonstrates how strong insincerity can come into play if the voter isn't sure that her true favorite is either a very strong nor a very weak candidate:

FairVote's article on Australian IRV elections confirms that savvy voters cast, and major political parties encourage, strongly insincere ballots.

STAR Voting never encourages strong insincerity in balloting. In order for an honest vote of maximum support for a true favorite to create a worse outcome for the voter under STAR, that support would have to knock a more viable "lesser evil" out of the automatic runoff. Because viability is highly correlated with overall score, a voter who fears her favorite and "lesser evil" are vying for second position in the runoff will be highly motivated to send the stronger of the two to the runoff in order to have the best chance of defeating the greater evil.

Weak Insincerity

Weak Insincerity is also known as "burying" or "skipping." A vote is weakly insincere if it includes offering maximum support among the choices to the voter's most preferred candidate, but skips support for a less preferred candidate in favor of candidates even less preferred. Voting methods including the Borda Count are vulnerable weak insincerity.

Although FairVote has hypothesized that voters will be tactically incentivized to "bury" a strong consensus candidate, this analysis does not hold up to reasonable scrutiny. The reality is that under STAR, voters are only likely to promote other challengers they like more than that strong consensus choice for a very simple reason: promoting any other candidate the voter likes less over a strong consensus choice increases the likelihood that the voter's first choice will get squeezed out of the runoff. And should that happen, the voter's full runoff vote will go to the least-preferred candidate. Should multiple factions adopt this strategy as FairVote suggest would have happened in a recent French election, all but one faction would see a worse outcome than had they voted sincerely. No voting system prevents voters from trying to be sneaky, but STAR Voting does a great job of giving no advantage for it.

"The Effect of Approval Balloting on Strategic Voting Under Alternative Decision Rules" confirms this conclusion, suggesting that burying is only effective in a multistage score process if the voter holds three key beliefs, (1) and (2) with great confidence: (1) that his favorite can make the runoff, (2) that his favorite can beat a third or lower preference candidate, (3) and that he is not sure his favorite can beat his second favorite in the runoff. Under STAR Voting, the voter who believes (3) cannot believe (1) with great confidence: if you aren't sure your favorite can beat your second choice, your first choice is in play for the second spot in the runoff. Adding any support to a less preferred candidate in this scenario simply increases the likelihood your own favorite will be squeezed out and that your runoff vote will go to someone you really don't like.

Restrictive Sincerity

Restrictive sincerity, also known as Tactical Minimization or "truncation," is where you decrease your support for some candidates other than your favorite. Pure Approval and Score voting systems are said to encourage tactical "bullet voting" - supporting just one's favorite candidate and dishonestly voting 0 for all the others in order to give the favored candidate the best chance of winning.

STAR Voting's runoff step corrects for strategic restrictive sincerity in two ways: first, by incentivizing voters to differentiate scores of multiple candidates to have a meaningful say in the runoff, and by equalizing the outcome influence of all voters in the runoff step.

Expansive Sincerity

A choice is expansively sincere if the voter offers higher support for secondary choices than would otherwise constitute a truly sincere vote. The extreme of expansive sincerity, Tactical Maximization, is where you increase support for candidates other than your favorite because you think your favorite is weak or you want to hedge your bet. In addition to the folks who say Score Voting systems are vulnerable to strategic "bullet voting", there are those who say the optimal Score vote is pretty much the opposite: that voters will gain strategic advantage by maximizing support for one perceived front runner and all the candidates the voter likes more than that one.

As above, STAR Voting's runoff step corrects for this strategic distortion in two ways: first, by incentivizing voters to differentiate scores of multiple candidates to have a meaningful say in the runoff, which amplifies the voice of those who do not maximally vote the top two into the runoff step.

The Science of Strategic Voting:

Strategic voting and its impacts can be difficult to quantify exactly, but statistical modeling using simulated voters and realistic voter behavior patterns can help determine what kinds of impacts to expect. This modeling is particularly helpful when comparing voting methods. Strategic voting incentives are measured as a ratio of how often strategic voting works for an individual voter and how often strategic voting will backfire.

The graphic below, from former Vice Chair of the Center for Election Science and Harvard PhD in Statistics Dr. Jameson Quinn's "Voter Satisfaction Efficiency" study shows that for STAR Voting this ratio is close to 1:1, while for IRV the ratio is 3:1, and Choose One Plurality voting displaying the worst strategic incentives by far with a 18:1 incentive to vote strategically.

The "Voter Satisfaction Efficiency" studies also look at the overall impacts of strategic voting on election outcomes and overall accuracy. These studies show that in "Choose-One" Plurality voting, the current voting method in much of the world, outcomes are more representative when voters are strategic and Choose-One voting strongly incentivizes strategic voting.

In contrast, Instant Runoff, Score Voting, and STAR Voting, as well as most other preference voting methods achieve the most representative outcomes when voters as a whole are honest, even though not all of these methods incentivize honest voting at the individual level, as we saw above.

These studies underscore the conclusion that if we hope to achieve accurate and representative elections we must incentivize honest voting, both for the individual voter, and for the electorate as a whole. Of the voting methods which are being seriously proposed in the USA, STAR Voting tops the charts at both.

Summary

While no voting system can entirely eliminate strategic incentives in every situation, STAR Voting strongly incentivizes voters to show their honest preference order, minimizes incentives for tactical voting, and the runoff mitigates the impacts of strategic voting even if some voters try to "game the system."

The key is the STAR Voting runoff. There is no need to strategically give your lesser-evil a full five stars. In the runoff, every ballot is one vote, regardless of the scores given originally. For this reason the runoff works as an equalizer, ensuring that even voters whose favorites were unable to win are still able to have an say in the election results. 

At the end of the day voters want to be able to vote their conscience and they want their votes to be fairly and equally counted. STAR Voting makes that possible.