Witnesses tell Michigan committee ranked‑choice voting would complicate elections, risk ballot exhaustion

LANSING — Two witnesses told the Michigan House Committee on Election Integrity that adopting ranked‑choice voting statewide would complicate voting, slow results and risk throwing out ballots, while committee members said they want proponents to present counterarguments before any action.

Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the committee that RCV “really does fundamentally jeopardize free and fair elections, particularly when it comes to voter confidence in the election system and to the transparency and accountability that voters expect.” His colleague, Trent England, summarized their position bluntly: “Ranked choice voting makes voting harder.”

The witnesses described how an RCV ballot asks voters to rank multiple candidates in each race and said that, if many voters stop ranking their choices before the final round, those ballots can be “exhausted” and removed from later rounds of tabulation. Snead and England warned that this mechanism…