Denver Ranked-Choice Voting Advocates Striking While Iron Is Hot

With sixteen mayoral candidates on the Denver ballot, plenty of voters had trouble deciding who to choose. Maybe a candidate matched their values, but that candidate didn't seem viable. Then again, voting for a viable candidate who didn't have matching values seemed wrong. Add to that the length of the campaign leading to April 4 and the prospect of another campaign through a two-month runoff, and many Denver residents felt fatigued and confused right up through election day.

But there's a solution to these issues, according to advocates for ranked-choice voting in Denver.

"RCV is one and done. Denver would no longer waste $1.1 million on the runoff election," Linda Templin, the executive director of Ranked Choice Voting for Colorado, said at an April 5 press conference in front of Denver's City and County Building. "RCV is easy, proven and fair. We know that Colorado voters who use it say that it is easy to rank their choices."

The day after the municipal election, Templin and other advocates of ranked-choice voting, including Flor Alvidrez, the candidate leading the Denver City Council District 7 race, gathered to announce the launch of the Denver Deserves Democracy committee, which will work over the next few years to bring ranked-choice voting to Denver.

Despite being a centuries-old method of choosing a winner, the process didn't catch on nationally until the last decade or so. Maine uses RCV for federal elections and statewide primaries, while Alaska has started using it for federal and state general elections. And plenty of cities across the U.S., including New York City and Minneapolis, employ RCV in local elections. Proponents contend that RCV lessens negative campaigning and allows candidates to focus on the issues.

In an RCV system, voters simply fill out a ballot by ranking candidates for a specific race in order of preference. Often, municipalities will cap how many people a voter can rank.

If Denver were to adopt RCV and then implement a limit of ranking five candidates, for example, voters could choose their first, second, third, fourth and fifth preferences for mayor. Or the voter could rank fewer; that's their choice.

Once votes are tallied, if no candidate has gotten over 50 percent of the first-place votes, then the candidate who got the fewest first-place votes is removed from the ballot. For ballots that had that candidate as a first choice, the second choice then becomes the first choice and is added to the count. This process continues until a candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote.

"Nobody is considered to be a frontrunner because they've got the biggest war chest," Templin said. "It frees the voters to truly vote their values."

Denver could have adopted ranked-choice voting in 2021, when city voters made another fix to comply with state and federal laws that require a 45-day mailing deadline for active-duty military and overseas citizens and an eighteen-day mailing deadline for domestic voters. Denver's timeline, which then had a May municipal election followed by a June runoff, was too tight. The Denver Clerk and Recorder's Office proposed to Denver City Council two possible solutions: Move the municipal election from May to April and keep the runoff in June, or switch to an instant runoff system: ranked-choice voting.

However, the RCV proposal ran into trouble at Denver City Council. Councilman Kevin Flynn, who just won reelection on April 4, was the leader of this opposition. "RCV almost never results in an actual majority winner. It disenfranchises voters who actually know who they want to vote for, and favors voters who can cast two, three or more votes, denying other voters the opportunity to study the finalists and cast knowledgeable votes," says Flynn, who believes ranked-choice voting would've been a disaster in this latest mayoral race. "The two-round runoff system is the only voting system that guarantees a majority winner every time."

As part of his case against ranked-choice voting, Flynn compiled a list of candidates elected through RCV in other municipalities who hadn't received a majority of first-place votes in the first round.

His arguments worked, and council ultimately opted against referring a ranked-choice voting measure, instead putting a proposal on the 2021 ballot to switch the municipal election date from May to April, which voters approved.

Despite this setback for RCV in Denver, a number of Colorado municipalities, including Basalt, Telluride, Carbondale, Broomfield, Boulder and Fort Collins, have already implemented or adopted ranked-choice voting. Denver Deserves Democracy wants the Mile High City to become the next to do so.

According to Lucille Wenegieme, a spokesperson for the Clerk and Recorder's Office, the Denver Elections Division team would be "prepared" to implement ranked-choice voting: "We're looking forward to continuing that conversation and seeing what that looks like for Denver voters."

But there's no rush.

"We're a little more flexible on the timeline, because we want to make sure Denver City Council has an opportunity to do this. We have essentially four years," Templin says. "We want to make sure that it's a careful stakeholder process. We aren't in that much of a hurry. But it's going to happen. We are going to bring this to the voters."

Meanwhile, the count continues in the Denver mayoral race, with a runoff slated for June 6.