Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Congressman Don Beyer (VA-08) renewed their efforts to bring ranked choice voting to U.S. congressional elections, reintroducing their *Ranked Choice Voting Act *. Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) is introducing companion legislation in the Senate.
The legislation would require ranked choice voting (RCV) in all congressional primary and general elections starting in 2028, allowing voters to express support for multiple candidates for public office, with the candidate receiving the most votes declared the winner.
It will be interesting to see if it passes Constitutional muster. The Constitution only requires that “the people” choose the legislator. Previous attempts to regulate voting like this required amendments (e.g. elimination of the poll tax).
I don’t see how it would violate that. Mathematically, Instant runoff style RCV is still one person one vote. Your ranking just gets to kind of direct where that vote goes once people are mathematically eliminated from contending, the vote only ever counts for one candidate at any given time.
Not quite.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S4-C1-3/ALDE_00013640/
The 24th amendment was a special case as it only applied to federal elections (so technically state office elections could still have a poll tax). There was also a question of voter qualification being outside the generally interpreted meaning of “times, places, and manner” so a statute wouldn’t be enough, but an amendment would.
RCV I think could generally be understood to be covered under “manner” and so Congress can do that without amendment for Congressional races.