The Effect of Voter Education on Behaviors in Ranked Choice Voting

The appeal of ranked choice voting has led to its recent meteoric rise throughout America, leading to adoption in a number of cities and a handful of states, but some critics and political scientists worry about its higher difficulty potentially leading to more errors and undesirable behavior. Utilizing an experiment, I find that a short voter education video is all that is required to reduce rates of errors and ideologically inconsistent behavior, while finding null results for undervoting, possibly due to its low occurrence in the sample. As ranked choice voting’s adoption is considered in each election cycle for jurisdictions ranging from small towns in Utah to statewide adoptions nationwide, this research clarifies the nature of some of the potential drawbacks of the reform. This may alleviate some concern for jurisdictions who are considering ranked choice voting if those jurisdictions are willing to commit resources to voter education.