Out-of-State Groups Back Ranked Choice Ban

By Anna Kaminski, Kansas Reflector

TOPEKA — Out-of-state, conservative nonprofits support a Kansas bill that would ban ranked-choice voting, which hasn’t been used on Kansans’ ballots since 2020. 

At a Monday hearing, legislators weighed Senate Bill 6, which would prohibit giving voters the option to rank candidates by order of preference. Ranked-choice voting was last used in Kansas during the 2020 party-run Democratic presidential primary, but it has never been used in an official election run by state or county election officers.

Opportunity Solutions Project, an arm of the Florida-based conservative think tank Foundation for Government Accountability, and the Honest Elections Project, a conservative elections nonprofit that is part of the advisory board for Project 2025, both offered testimony supporting a ban.

Current state law does not provide guidance for ranked-choice voting methods, said Jason Long with the Kansas Office of the Revisor of Statutes. The bill, which was the subject of a hearing Monday, would establish a definition for ranked-choice voting and cement a ban on the practice at all levels of government. 

The bill defines ranked-choice voting as “a form of voting that allows voters to rank two or more candidates for an elected office in order of preference and tabulates the cast ballots in multiple rounds with the elimination of the lowest vote-receiving candidate after each round until a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast.”

Clay Barker, general counsel to the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office, testified that the purpose of ranked-choice voting is to ensure that “the eventual prevailing candidate is the consensus choice of a majority of the voters.”

Little research exists on the impacts of ranked-choice voting. Opponents say it is costly for governments, complicated for voters and might suppress voter turnout. Proponents say it increases voter satisfaction because the most popular candidate is more likely to win and offers alternatives to the two major political parties.

“Every time I hear it, I’m confused,” said Sen. Mike Thompson, chairman of the Senate federal and state affairs committee, at the Monday hearing.

Elaine Stephen, an opponent of the bill, likened the process of ranked-choice voting to selecting one’s lunch. 

“If you’re thinking hamburger versus taco versus pizza, (and) if you go and they don’t have hamburgers downstairs in the snack bar, well then you automatically know what your second choice is,” she said. “That’s what ranked-choice voting is.”

Stephen, who testified Monday on her own behalf despite her role as co-leader of the pro-ranked-choice voting organization Rank the Vote Kansas, pointed to Minneapolis, Alaska and Maine, which have enacted ranked-choice voting in recent years. Ireland and Australia have been using the method for more than a century each. 

Madeline Malisa, a Portland, Maine, fellow with Opportunity Solutions Project gave similar testimony as she did last year, saying ballots are discarded in order to achieve a majority vote. 

“It’s un-American to throw out ballots by design,” she said. 

Ballots are not thrown out because of the design of ranked-choice voting. Instead, common reasons for ballot rejections could include failing to meet mail-in deadlines, incorrect voter registration information or voting at an incorrect polling location.

Jason Snead, the executive director of Honest Elections Project Action said ranked-choice voting “makes every stage of the voting process more complicated, so much so that enormous effort must be put into reeducating the public.”

Eleven states have rejected ranked-choice voting, including in Missouri where voters approved a ban in the 2024 election.

This story has been updated to clarify that ranked-choice voting has never been used in official elections — only in party-run elections, which are not the subject of the bill.