By Jessica Hill Las Vegas Sun
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
LAS VEGAS — A proposed ballot initiative in Nevada seeks to amend the state constitution to establish open top-five primaries and ranked-choice voting for general elections, but it isn't without its critics.
The Nevada Voters First political action committee is spearheading the initiative and must collect 140,777 signatures from registered Nevada voters by June 29 to qualify the measure for the 2022 general election ballot.
Approval in November would call on the Nevada Legislature to institute the changes to the state constitution by July 1, 2025.
In ranked-choice balloting, voters are directed to mark candidates in order of preference — and to mark as many choices as they want. A voter may also choose only one candidate.
The proposal would establish open primary elections, including all candidates regardless of party affiliation, squaring off in ranked-choice fashion. The top five finishers would advance to the general election, which would also be conducted using ranked-choice voting.
About 30% of registered voters in Nevada list themselves as nonpartisan, and about 40% aren't registered as Republican or Democrat, said Sondra Cosgrove, a representative with Nevada Voters First and a past president of the League of Women Voters of Nevada.
"That's a lot of people who are being shut out of important races," Cosgrove said.
Election officials would tabulate each ballot as one vote for the highest-ranked candidate. If a candidate wins a majority of 50% or more of first-preference votes, that candidate would be the winner.
But if no candidate is highest ranked on a majority of the ballots, the initiative proposes to continue tabulation in sequential rounds with the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes eliminated and their votes redistributed to each voter's second-choice pick.
That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.
Critics have plenty of issues with the ranked-choice system, including that it would create confusion among voters.
"Ranked-choice voting makes casting a ballot more time consuming, more complicated and more confusing for voters," said Emily Persaud-Zamora, executive director of Silver State Voices who spoke at a recent news conference on behalf of Let Nevadans Vote, a coalition of 25 organizations dedicated to civic education and engagement of Nevada voters.
"It will inevitably lead to increased errors," Persaud-Zamora said. "Ranked-choice vote ballots are significantly more likely to be thrown out and uncounted because of those voters' mistakes, ultimately disenfranchising more voters because of an overly complex and burdensome process."
Under the initiative, if a voter accidentally assigns the same ranking to more than one candidate, that ballot would be considered inactive and would not be counted. If a voter skips a ranking, the election board would count the next ranking, but if another ranking is skipped, the ballot also would be considered inactive.
Cosgrove said ballots would not be thrown out. If someone did make a mistake on one race, for example, that race may not be counted, but the entire ballot wouldn't be thrown out. People leave certain races blank all the time, Cosgrove said.
In 2020, Nevada's Democratic presidential caucuses used ranked-choice voting in which voters selected three to five presidential preferences on a paper ballot, Cosgrove said.
"Nobody thought it was confusing then," said Cosgrove, who is also chair of the Nevada secretary of state's advisory committee on participatory democracy.
Still, opposition remains.
There are already barriers in place for voters, from technological to language, said Eric Jeng, director of outreach for the Asian Community Development Council, which has been working to provide Chinese translations of ballots for Chinese-speaking voters to understand.
"This will lead us backward," Jeng said at the Let Nevadans Vote news conference. "We believe in educating and empowering voters to make voter and civic engagement easy and equitable. … We want to make sure counting ballots should be fast, should be quick, and making sure we trust the system."
Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said he wasn't for or against the initiative.
A change to ranked-choice voting would initially strain election administrators, he said, because they would have to train themselves and teach the public. Ultimately, though, he said it would be doable.
The tabulation process is automated, Gloria said, and the system allows the registrar to rank the top three candidates. Depending on "how deep" voters would want to go with the ranking, election administrators might have to reprogram their system to allow for the top-five candidates to be ranked.
Ranked-choice voting, he said, is something the voters would be able to learn.
"We don't give the general public enough credit. They learn," Gloria said, pointing to the vote-by-mail changes in the 2020 election as well as the change from punch-card ballots to voting on computers. "People here are used to change. … It's not hard," he said.
Ruben Murillo Jr., a retired special education teacher from Clark County School District and a former leader of the Clark County and Nevada Education Associations, said he didn't like making ranked-choice voting part of the state constitution. It's more difficult to make changes and modifications to a constitutional amendment as opposed to state law, he said.
Opponents to the proposed question have filed lawsuits aimed at keeping it off the ballot, however a Carson City judge at the beginning of 2022 rejected a claim that the changes to both primary and general elections violated the single-subject rule for ballot initiatives.
Fifty-five U.S. cities currently use ranked-choice voting for municipal elections.
Maine, in 2016, became the first state in which voters approved the use of ranked-choice balloting. Ranked choice voting is used in all of Maine's state-level primary elections, and in general elections only for federal offices, according to the Maine secretary of state's website. The Maine Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion that said state-level general elections must be determined by a plurality of votes.
Ranked-choice voting ballot initiatives have been proposed in other states. Alaska in 2020 is the only other state where such a ballot measure has been approved.
Cosgrove called ranked-choice a natural behavior, so using it in the voting booth should be no different.
When she is going to a restaurant, for example, she may decide that she wants a Greek salad. But if the restaurant doesn't have a Greek salad, she may opt for chicken tenders. And if they don't have that, she'll just have ice cream.
"We do ranked-choice all the time," she said.
