Ranked choice voting: Michigan group plans 2026 ballot proposal. What to know

• Michigan group making plans for potential 2026 ballot proposal for ranked choice voting, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference
• Advocates say ranked choice voting can reduce polarization and ensure consensus candidates win
• Critics call it ‘more complicated, more partisan, and less transparent’

LANSING — A grassroots group is laying the groundwork for a potential 2026 ballot proposal to bring ranked choice voting to Michigan by amending the state Constitution. 

The effort is in its early stages and faces an uphill battle: Voters in five states rejected similar proposals last year, and five other states banned the practice, though residents in Washington, DC, approved it.

But advocates for ranked choice voting — where voters rank candidates in order of preference — contend it could reduce political polarization, increase voter turnout, and produce candidates and winners that better reflect voters’ views.

And they are working to spread that message in Michigan, beginning last year, with town halls and policy summits. Organizers have established regional field offices and say they’ve recruited more than 1,000 volunteers. 

“Through ranked choice voting, we're hoping to empower voters and give them the ability to have better candidates, more options, their voice be heard, and have policies that reflect them,” Pat Zabawa, Rank MI Vote’s associate director, told Bridge Michigan.

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The group aims to implement ranked choice voting in Michigan's federal elections, along with elections for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and the state legislature.

And they want to allow municipalities to decide for themselves, including five cities — Ferndale, Kalamazoo, Royal Oak, East Lansing and Ann Arbor — that have already adopted ranked choice voting rules but haven't been able to use the system due to barriers in the state constitution. 

Evidence from early adoptees of ranked choice voting in the U.S. hasn’t always borne out claims of depolarization, and views of ranked choice increasingly fall along partisan lines, a challenge in purple Michigan.

“There is definitely evidence that it's kind of viewed as a progressive reform,” said Andrew Eggers, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. “I do think it’s an issue of communication.”

Stop RCV, a national coalition of right-wing groups, contends ranked choice voting is “more complicated, more partisan, and less transparent” while encouraging “fringe candidates and radical splinter parties.”

At least one looming question remains for Michigan organizers: How exactly to make it happen in the state?

There’s multiple ways to implement ranked choice voting — with differences that could upend how Michigan conducts elections — and Rank MI Vote leaders are still working to reach a consensus.

How it works

The core principle of ranked choice voting, sometimes called instant runoff voting, is allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

Initially only voters’ top choice is counted, but if no candidate has an immediate majority, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated. 

All the voters who chose the eliminated candidate then have their second-place votes distributed to the remaining contestants. The process repeats until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote.

In ranked choice voting, the notion of a spoiler candidate — think Ross Perot in the 1996 presidential election — could evaporate by allowing Michiganders to vote their conscience, encouraging third-party participation.

Advocates offers a suite of educational tools including visualizations of how the process works, along with interactive ballots that instruct how to vote properly. Voters also don’t have to rank every single candidate, but their choices carry more weight if they do.

Critics have also seized on the relative complexity of the process, both for voters and election administrators, in their campaigns against ranked choice. Eggers theorized that a conspiratorial political climate is a boost for their arguments.

“It does seem like, in an environment where people are claiming that an election was stolen, that adding a little bit of extra technocratic complication maybe invites more of that,” he said. 

Stop RCV, on their website, claims using ranked choice “could make it impossible” to verify results in “close or questionable elections” citing the difficulty of hand recounts, a frequent demand of election deniers. At least one survey has shown Americans are less comfortable with ranked choice voting when the leading plurality vote-getter is not elected.

Zabawa, the Rank MI Vote organizer, dismisses any accusations of partisan slant as a misconception.

“What we want is representative candidates, candidates who work for their constituents and don't seek to work for some small subset of their supporters,” he said.

The effort has some notable champions, including Katie Fahey, the election reform activist who spearheaded the 2018 Voters Not Politicians petition drive to create Michigan's independent redistricting commission. Rank MI Vote announced in August that it was working with Fahey.   

The impacts of ranked choice voting over the current plurality election system haven’t been widely studied. Eggers and Georgetown University professor Laurent Bouton, in a review of research on the topic, found that in theory ranked choice voting should advantage more moderate candidates, but in some circumstances it can also produce more polarized results, depending on the makeup of the electorate.

They also noted that California cities that adopted ranked choice voting saw an increase in the number of nonwhite candidates who ran for office and women minority candidates were elected at a higher rate.

The primary question

Christian Potts, a 20-year-old University of Michigan sophomore, who jumped at the chance to campaign for ranked choice voting after learning about it in a political science class last year. 

In regular late evening weekday video calls, Potts gives hour-long public presentations that extoll the virtues of ranked choice voting. He’s also working to get students involved via college organizing teams. 

“There's not a catchy tagline, really, at least it takes a little bit more explanation, a little bit more convincing,” Potts told Bridge. “We do believe that once people have a basic understanding of it, they do want to support it.”

But when one attendee asked him how their proposal will affect party primaries, Potts couldn’t offer a definitive answer, because the group hasn’t decided yet.

The extent of the changes they’ll seek to make to Michigan elections remains “a heated debate for the next couple of weeks” as Rank MI Vote’s leaders finalize a proposal, Potts said.

Currently in Michigan primaries, voters have to choose one major party or the other to select a nominee in a public vote. Third parties like the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Working Class Party and Green Party pick their general election candidates through internal conventions. 

But before the Michigan group can hammer out ballot language and start collecting petition signatures, they will have to decide if they want to be Maine or Alaska. 

They are the only states in the U.S. that use ranked choice for regular statewide elections, but they execute it in substantially different ways. 

In Maine, there are still partisan primaries, conducted through ranked choice voting, and nominees are sent on to a ranked-choice general election in the fall. With this approach, Michigan’s election process would largely stay intact — including straight-ticket voting — though ballots would look different.

Alaskan voters, on the other hand, have opted to conduct open primaries, also known as nonpartisan primaries. There candidates from every party appear on a single primary ballot and voters make only one pick per office. The top four vote-getters then move on to a ranked-choice ballot for the general election. Alaska also rejected a ranked choice repeal effort in 2024.

Party nominees for Attorney General, Secretary of State, Michigan Supreme Court justices and university boards are decided internally at conventions, and it's not yet clear if this approach would change that process.

On a personal level, Potts said he prefers the open primary approach because it “opens the door for more new candidates having a voice in elections,” though he finds himself “flip-flopping a little bit” between the options.

“What I want to see is ranked choice voting win in Michigan, and I want the option that has the best chance at winning,” Potts said. “I'm going to be ride or die for Rank MI Vote, so whatever leadership ends up going with, I’m sticking with it.”