Michigan Election Integrity Warriors Stop Ranked-Choice Voting

Michigan’s “disastrous” ranked-choice voting drive is dead — for now. And Wolverine State election-integrity warriors can take a bow for killing it. 

Organizers of Rank MI Vote, the group behind a campaign to bring the alternative voting system that liberals love to the purple state, is “pausing signature gathering efforts,” Bridgemi.com reported. 

The petition drive was a long way from reaching the 446,198 signatures needed to bring a RCV constitutional amendment question to the November 2026 ballot.  

“We were sensing the RCV folks were losing momentum,” Darlene Hennessy, a Wayne County volunteer who led Michigan Fair Elections Institute’s opposition movement, said in an MFEI post. “When it came out they were short 200,000 signatures for their petitions, we were pretty confident of this eventuality.”

Institute founder and chairwoman Patrice Johnson celebrated the victory. 

“Our resources were limited, but we organized early and our leaders uncovered an army of Michiganders eager to join our opposition once they learned the truth about Ranked Choice Voting,” she said.

‘Higher Risk of Corruption’

Rank MI Vote describes itself as a “non-partisan, volunteer-led, grassroots organization” dedicated to changing the state’s constitution to allow ranked-choice voting for statewide office.

The alternate voting system is, as the name implies, a ranking system. It’s a bit like the Associated Press Top 25 College Football Poll, and, critics would tell you, even more flawed. Voters rank candidates in each race in order of preference. If no candidate secures more than 50 percent of first-place votes in the first round of voting, the candidate that finishes in last place is tossed out, with those votes going to the voter’s second choice. The winnowing process continues until one of the candidates reaches a majority of the vote and is declared the winner. 

A Michigan Fair Election Institute analysis earlier this year detailed the myriad problems with the convoluted voting system. 

“To summarize, ranked choice voting, RCV, is the name of the system proposed here in Michigan, while Instant-Runoff Voting, or IRV, is the mechanism which the proposed amendment seeks to implement. Both are problematic, and enacted in concert, their impact would be disastrous,” asserts the MFEI report titled, Ranked Choice Voting: A Threat to Our Electoral Process. “Non-majority election winners, lower voter confidence and turnout rates, and higher risk of corruption and moral hazard are only a few of the many downsides that Michigan voters stand to face if RCV is codified in our state.”

‘A Black Eye’

Ranked-choice voting, as the New York Times trumpeted, propelled Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in this year’s New York City mayoral race. In 2021, an RCV debacle in the metropolis cast a national spotlight on the system’s many warts. The Big Apple’s election officials were unable to declare a winner for weeks, exposing the “complex way of choosing candidates,” Politico reported at the time. 

“My concern is that New York’s experience will give ranked-choice voting a black eye,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a far-left Democrat now running for governor, told the news outlet at the time. 

Bellows, who trampled all over the constitution in disqualifying President Donald Trump from Maine’s 2024 primary ballot, is one of the nation’s most vehement RCV proponents. Why wouldn’t she be? Bellows was elected secretary of state thanks to ranked-choice voting. She initiated the runoff system in Maine’s messy Second Congressional District election. Both candidates objected. 

Maine and Alaska are the only two states that use RCV in statewide elections. Last year, Alaska voters narrowly defeated a ballot initiative to repeal the system, after weeks of vote counting and months of pro-RCV, out-of-state dark money pouring in, as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported.

‘Unintended Consequences’ 

While ranked-choice voting advocates insist that the system takes the rancor out of elections and expands citizen engagement, opponents say RCV smashes the sacred idea of “one person, one vote.” And then there are the “unintended consequences” that the self-proclaimed defenders against disenfranchisement don’t like to talk about.

Nolan McCarty, professor of Politics and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, found that while RCV expands the candidate field, “it also increases the likelihood of non-majority winners and votes going uncounted in the final tally.”

“This effect is particularly pronounced in districts with higher concentrations of minority voters, where ballots are more likely to become ‘exhausted’ — meaning all the voter’s candidates have been eliminated, so their vote does not contribute to the final round,” a February press release from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation states. McCarty presented his findings as part of the schools’ American Politics Speaker series at Harvard’s graduate school for public policy and leadership. 

Voters in several states, including liberal bastions Oregon and Colorado, rejected RCV measures last year. In Nevada, a ranked-choice voting constitutional amendment was defeated after voters approved it in 2022. Passage required approval in two consecutive elections. Missouri voters approved a ballot question banning the system. But Washington, D.C. voters overwhelmingly supported ranked-choice voting, as they did in allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.   

‘We’ll be Ready for Them’

Rank MI Vote’s bid to put the question on next year’s ballot seemed cooked after the Michigan Association of County Clerks voiced their opposition. 

Hennessy said the MFEI’s campaign to educate Michiganders about the perils of RCV began early and involved key partnerships. 

“As early as February, we were organizing, reaching out to experts from other states who had successfully battled Ranked Choice Voting,” the Wayne County volunteer said in the election integrity watchdog’s post. “We were passing out palm cards in the summer and simultaneously organizing town hall meetings on the topic.”

Rank MI Vote says the battle to bring ranked-choice voting to Michigan is far from over. The group said it is planning a “second launch in April 2027” in time for the 2028 ballot. 

“We are leaving all options on the table for the future of our movement,” Rank MI Vote executive director Pat Zabawa told Bridge Michigan in the statement. “Our over 2,500 volunteers are fully committed to lowering the temperature of our politics while increasing voter turnout through ranked choice voting.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” Hennessy said.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.