RCV in Wyoming's 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary
The Wyoming Democratic Party use ranked choice voting (RCV) in the 2020 presidential primary. See below for results and analysis.
How RCV works in presidential primaries
In elections with a 15% threshold to earn delegates (like in Wyoming), RCV eliminates candidates below the 15% threshold and transfers those ballots to those voters’ next choice candidate. This process continues until all remaining candidates are across the threshold. Delegates are awarded proportionally among the active candidates.
RCV results in Wyoming
Find more visualizations of this result at RCVis.com
Top takeaways
- Voter turnout was more than double the turnout in the 2016 caucuses.
- After the first round, Joe Biden had won 65.7% of the vote, Bernie Sanders had won 23.9% of the vote, Elizabeth Warren had won 4.5% of the vote, and 5.9% were dispersed among other candidates.
- By the final tally, Biden had won 72.2% of the vote and Sanders had won 27.8% of the vote. Biden gained 6.% and Sanders gained 3.8% of their final total from backers of other candidates.
- More than 10% of ballots were cast for candidates other than Sanders or Biden and would not have counted in the final tally without ranked choice voting. Nearly nine in ten (89%) voters who backed withdrawn candidates had their ballot count for Sanders or Biden based on their rankings.
- Fewer than one in 500 voters made errors that would render their ballots unusable; 99.8% of ballots were valid in the first use of ranked choice voting in Wyoming.
Voter education materials from Wyoming
Further reading
Ranked Choice Voting in Presidential Primaries. A research report from FairVote about the five state Democratic parties who used RCV in 2020 presidential primaries.