Georgia runoff election excludes 400,000 voters. There is a better way to select winners.
Democrat Raphael Warnock has finally won the U.S. Senate election in Georgia. If this feels familiar, it may be because Warnock made headlines after coming out ahead after the general election less than a month ago. He also became one of the public faces of the battle over the Senate in another runoff back in 2020. While Georgia is committed to majority outcomes, ranked choice voting (“instant runoff”) voting would have ensured better participation in real time.
In the general election on November 8th, Warnock led Republican challenger Hershel Walker and Libertarian Chase Oliver, but only earned 49.4% of the vote. Warnock and Walker headed to a December 6th runoff election to determine a majority winner.
Once again, Warnock beat Walker. But in this final round, both candidates got fewer votes than they earned in the first round. Total turnout dropped from 3.9 million to 3.5 million.
If the goal of Georgia’s runoff system is to elect the winner with the broadest support, how can we justify a system in which hundreds of thousands fewer Georgians participate in the decisive round? Not every voter was taken into account in the runoff because not as many voters showed up.
Georgia is one of just two states that holds delayed runoff elections for general elections, although an additional 8 states use runoffs in primary elections. Recent research by FairVote finds that turnout declines in nearly all primary runoff elections (96%) and every Georgia general election runoff has had lower turnout over the last three decades.
This turnout decline appears to be roughly 10%, making it the high-water mark for Georgia runoff elections. Given past trends, this should be considered a best-case-scenario for runoff elections, with higher-than-expected turnout possibly tied to the estimated $81 million spent on advertising in the four weeks leading up to this runoff.
All of these problems – the turnout decline, extreme costs, and the headache for voters who had to wait in line again – could have been avoided with ranked choice voting (RCV). The system conducts an ‘instant runoff,’ giving voters the freedom to express their preferences on all the candidates the first time they go to the polls. Figuring out which candidate the majority prefers would take only seconds, not a month.
The best part is, Georgia already has this in place for some voters! In 2021, the state legislature passed a bill to send ranked ballots to military and overseas voters during the initial election, allowing them to indicate who their pick would be in the event of a runoff. RCV guarantees that those voters can make their voice heard without struggling to receive and return a new runoff ballot by the deadline.
Numerous Georgia officials across multiple parties are voicing interest in ranked choice voting as an alternative to their slow, expensive, lower-turnout runoff – including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux, State Rep Stacey Evans, State Senator Michelle Au, and Libertarian Senate nominee Chase Oliver. This would be a great step towards faster, cheaper elections in the Peach State, and we encourage them to take it.
Image of the Georgia State Capitol adapted from the original by Andre m under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
