Is ranked choice voting right for Fort Collins? Voters may decide on this year's ballot

Melanie Potyondy was the favorite to win Fort Collins City Council’s District 4 seat last year.

She entered Election Day as the top fundraiser among district candidates, with endorsements from most of council and several months of experience in the role as an interim member. But she was also running against three other progressive candidates in a five-person race.

Potyondy lost by 43 votes to now-council member Shirley Peel, the only conservative candidate on the ballot for District 4. The race has become Fort Collins progressives' poster child for efforts to adopt ranked choice voting, a method that allows voters to rank candidates by order of preference. A measure asking Fort Collins voters to move city elections to ranked choice voting appears headed for the Nov. 8 special election ballot, though it hasn't gotten official council sign-off yet.

Potyondy has mixed feelings about the role Fort Collins’ plurality election system played in her loss.

“The reality was, it wasn’t anybody’s place to tell anybody not to run, because everybody has the right to run,” Potyondy said in a recent interview. “It just mathematically wasn't necessarily a smart choice for progressive candidates, for us to all have similar values, and then have none of those values necessarily make it to the end of the race.”

Peel won with 30.37% of the vote. For the record, she doesn't know if ranked choice voting would’ve made a difference in her race — she thinks she would’ve gotten a fair amount of second- and third-choice votes given the less partisan nature of local campaigns. Still, you don’t need a political science degree to see that the majority of southwest Fort Collins’ 7,429 voters who cast ballots gravitated toward a more left-leaning platform.

Previous coverage: City election marked by landslides, nail-biters and historic results

In a plurality election, Peel won fair and square. If Fort Collins switches to a ranked choice voting system, races like hers might have a different outcome. That’s exactly why people can’t agree on ranked choice voting.

In a ranked choice election, any candidate who gets more than 50% of first-choice votes wins. If no one gets a majority, the last-place candidate gets knocked out. Those who voted for the last-place finisher have their votes redistributed to their second-choice picks. The process continues until one candidate has the majority of active ballots, with some ballots exhausted along the way if voters who cast them didn’t rank every candidate.

Most seated council members have signaled they want to put a ranked choice measure on the ballot — except for Peel, who worries the new method would increase distrust among voters and would prefer that residents gather signatures to put it on the ballot themselves.

Council is expected to vote in June on referral of the ballot measure, which if passed would implement the new voting method for city elections in 2025. (The 2025 timeline would give the city more time to implement ranked choice voting, and it would mean it wouldn't be in effect for next year's District 4 election. The 2021 District 4 election was for a two-year term to fill a vacancy.)

It would be Fort Collins voters’ second chance to weigh in on ranked choice voting. A previous resident-initiated ballot measure lost with 38.63% approval in 2011. Since then, ranked choice voting has become more common across the country. It’s now used in at least 43 jurisdictions, with more on the way in the next election cycle.

Arguments for and against ranked choice voting

Wading into the public debate over ranked choice voting feels kind of like watching a frenetic tennis match, because it involves contradictory views of many key points. Supporters say it’s more democratic; opponents say it’s a sophisticated form of voter suppression. Supporters praise the system for incentivizing coalition-building among candidates; opponents criticize that kind of intercampaign collaboration as backroom deal-making. Supporters say it encourages candidates to build broad coalitions of support; opponents say it fosters extremism.

At the heart of the issue is disagreement over whether a plurality of the vote justifies a win, and whether accounting for voters’ second, third and successive preferences increases their agency or degrades it.

Supporters of ranked choice voting say the system ensures the results of an election represent voters’ true consensus, empowers voters to express the full spectrum of their opinions on a slate of candidates and encourages people to run for office without fear of vote-splitting or spoiling.

“At its very core, it just allows several people to run and the voters to be able to vote for who they actually want,” said Jody DesChenes, co-management lead of Ranked Choice Voting for Fort Collins, the group that's been pushing council to consider a ballot measure for more than a year. “It’s about letting the voters present a perfect, concise snapshot of what they exactly want, and then having the result be what the majority of people either want or are OK with.”

Opponents object to the fact that a candidate could come close to winning the majority in the first round of tallying but end up losing as voters’ successive choices are accounted for. They argue that candidates can use ranked choice voting to “gamify” an election by strategizing with other candidates to push certain opponents to last place. They also call ranked choice voting overly complicated and take issue with the concept of exhausted ballots, or ballots that become inactive during processing because of voter error, limits to the number of candidates that can be ranked, or the voters’ choice to not rank all the candidates.

Analysis by FairVote, a group that advocates for ranked choice voting, found that a median of 71% of voters ranked multiple candidates in ranked choice races with three or more candidates.

“The very simplistic piece of that is that not all votes count,” said Steve Lucas, president of right-leaning political advocacy group Citizens for a Sustainable Economy. “If you're exhausting ballots, that means people's votes or ballots are being thrown away at some portion of the ballot.”

The result is a “contrived majority,” Lucas said. His group is campaigning against ranked choice voting and plans to increase efforts if it gets on the ballot.

Ranked choice voting advocates emphasize that ballots are only exhausted if voters choose not to rank everyone. Nick Armstrong, a ranked choice voting advocate and former District 1 council candidate, called the exhausted ballot argument a “red herring” — a marketing term that ignores the existence of the same issue in the current election system.

Ranked Choice Voting for Fort Collins management lead Robbie Moreland looks at it this way: “An exhausted ballot is any ballot that does not have the winner on it as your vote. … in the District 4 race, 70% of the people had an exhausted ballot. Plurality races have a way worse exhausted ballot problem than ranked choice voting.”

Ranked choice voting advocates don’t see it as a perfect system but rather an improvement on the perceived flaws of plurality voting. They point to research that shows ranked choice voting elections involve more cordial campaigning with less negativity. After all, DesChenes said, it doesn’t serve a candidate to bash their opponents if they’re hoping to net second- and third-choice votes.

More: 2 major changes to Fort Collins elections could be on the November ballot

Ranked choice voting could have impacted 22% of Fort Collins races since 1997

Though last year’s District 4 race has been a common case-in-point for ranked choice voting supporters, it’s not the only one where ranked choice voting could have made an impact.

Had ranked choice voting been in effect, the ranked choice process would have come into play for 22% of Fort Collins City Council races since 1997, or 12 of 54 races, the Coloradoan found. That category includes all races with at least three candidates where the first-place finisher didn’t get more than 50% of the vote. Here are some other examples:

• In 2019, council member Julie Pignataro won a four-person race with 41.06% of the vote. The second-place finisher, Noah Hutchison, was 40 votes behind with 40.44% of the vote. (Mayor pro-tem Emily Francis and council member Susan Gutowsky also won their 2019 races without a majority, though by larger margins.)

• In 2011, Karen Weitkunat won a three-candidate mayoral race with 45.53% of the vote to Ross Cunniff’s 42.36%.

• In 2005, Doug Hutchinson won a three-candidate mayoral race with 46.79% of the vote to Bill Bertschy’s 40.67%.

• In 2001, Eric Hamrick won a four-candidate District 3 race with 43.36% of the vote to Greg Snyder's 35.79%.

• In 1999, Ray Martinez won a six-candidate mayoral race with 27.89% of the vote to Linda Stanley's 25.09%.

These examples don’t account for another potential impact of ranked choice voting: encouraging more people to run. In those same 54 council races since 1997, an average of 2 ½ candidates ran for each seat. Both mayoral races and council member races most commonly had two candidates, meaning voters usually didn’t get a lot of options.

Potyondy said she thinks the establishment would feel less daunting for prospective candidates if ranked choice voting were in effect.

“I really do feel like (in) our current system … unless you really feel like you have a good chance of winning, you may not even run — even if you really feel like you want to get your message out there or your face out there, or you want to push the other candidates,” she said.

Questions about ranked choice voting's complexity, implementation abound

Another point of contention for ranked choice voting is its complexity. The process of ranking itself isn’t complex, but taking full advantage of the ability to rank candidates could require more careful research by voters than simply picking their favorite. There’s also the risk of unintended undervotes, where voters don’t rank all the candidates, or overvotes, where voters rank more than one candidate as their first choice.

“It takes voting and it makes it extremely complicated,” Lucas said. “It's hard to get people to pay attention now. How are they going to pay attention when there's all these additional people running for office?”

Opponents also point to examples of ranked choice voting elections that have had troubles on the processing and tabulation side, such as the New York City mayoral primary last year.

Ranked choice voting supporters said the method isn’t usually to blame for specific election issues — the New York mayoral primary, for example, had issues because election workers accidentally included sample ballots in election night results. And they added that Fort Collins’ prospective 2025 implementation will give the City Clerk’s Office plenty of time to prepare for the new method and test out the appropriate hardware and software.

Armstrong said the complexity argument may be selling voters a bit short, and he added that issue would be better resolved with improved voter education.

“It's a safe assumption that voters in Fort Collins are smart, passionate, able to articulate their choices and will fill out the ballot to the degree that they wish to,” he said.

Coloradoan Conversations: Fort Collins ranked choice voting proposal stirs vigorous debate

City Clerk Anissa Hollingshead has experience with ranked choice elections. She led voter education and outreach for the city of Minneapolis in 2013, the year the city took the work in-house for its ranked choice local elections. She said a big takeaway from her experience was that it’s important to emphasize voters have the opportunity to rank as many candidates as they want, but choosing not to rank everyone does no harm to their preferred candidate.

Hollingshead isn’t taking a stance on ranked choice voting, but she did take issue with an argument that the method disenfranchises voters who aren’t white or make less money.

“Having had to refute that specific point for many years, it really is an offensive way to look at things,” she said. “To say that certain parts of our community will have a harder time with this based on their race or their income level is just silly. It's something that I think requires good communication and being forward-thinking in how we’re communicating with folks, but there's certainly not any barriers to understanding the process that are based on someone's status in any way whatsoever.”

Hollingshead said the cost of implementing ranked choice voting would depend on whether local elections remain in April or move to November, another potential change council is considering putting on the ballot. If elections stay in April, they’ll be city-run and Hollingshead predicts the city will be able to rent the needed equipment for about the same cost as it pays now. If city elections move to November, they’ll be coordinated with Larimer County and the costs would be less predictable.

Voter education is another cost to consider, since the city would need to inform voters about the new election method to prevent confusion. While some cities have spent upward of six figures on voter education for ranked choice voting, Hollingshead said she’s confident the city would be able to do it for less than that, particularly with the help of grant funding. She added that expanding voter education is one of her priorities regardless of whether the city changes its election system.

We saved two points for last, because they’re among the least certain: How would ranked choice voting affect voter turnout and representation on council?

The research on turnout is mixed. In some cities, ranked choice voting seemed to increase turnout; in others, turnout was flat. Hollingshead said ranked choice voting could effectively increase turnout if it encourages more people to run, because having more competitive races with more candidates generally yields higher turnout. But she said the main driver of turnout is what’s on the ballot, not how the ballot is formatted.

Finally, would ranked choice voting make it harder for more conservative people to get elected on council?

Though opponents often describe it as a liberal strategy, ranked choice voting has been implemented in both progressive and conservative areas, including Maine, Utah, California and Alaska. But one impact of ranked choice voting is that it can erode a path toward victory for the minority party by preventing vote-splitting. Judging by recent results of local, state and national races, the conservative viewpoint is currently the minority in Fort Collins, albeit not by a huge margin.

More: Analysis: Larimer County's 2020 election results show blue wave's staying power

No one interviewed for this story advocated for vote-splitting. Without it, though, council wouldn’t have any conservative members at all, which would mean more limited representation for a significant portion of the electorate. Ranked choice voting supporters said that might be more appropriate — if the voters in a district have a more progressive bent, so should their representatives.

Lucas said ranked choice voting’s potential impact on conservative candidates doesn’t play into his group’s opposition, though it has provided financial support mostly to conservative council candidates in recent years.

Peel said she hadn’t thought much about ranked choice voting’s impact on representation, but she did say she’s proud of how her perspective has influenced council over the last year.

She’s been vocal about the city’s need to commit only to the projects and priorities it can pay for, which she feels has made an impact on recent budget and revenue discussions.

“I do try really hard to bring that moderate perspective to the council,” she said. “I think that's actually been beneficial, because when everybody thinks exactly alike, you do go in one direction. You end up with (people’s voices) not being heard."

Jacy Marmaduke covers government accountability for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter @jacymarmaduke. Support her work and that of other Coloradoan journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Voters may decide if ranked choice voting is right for Fort Collins.