Ohio Senate advances ranked choice voting ban

Yahoo

20-05-2025

A ballot counter machine. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)
With minimal debate last week, the Ohio Senate advanced a measure effectively prohibiting ranked choice voting in the state. 'Effectively' because state lawmakers actually can't ban the practice. Instead, Senate Bill 63 threatens to withhold an important stream of state funding for any local government that embraces ranked choice.
The proposal's sponsors are bipartisan, and although the bill passed easily the vote split the chamber's Democrats. Five of the Senate's nine Democrats voted no. The bill now moves to the Ohio House where there is no companion legislation.
State Sens. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, and Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, sponsored the measure, and both made their pitch to fellow senators when it came up for a vote. Gavarone said she's spent much of her time in office working on elections-related legislation.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
'Ranked choice voting flies in the face of that commonsense work by causing greater uncertainty and delayed election results that can take days or even weeks to settle,' she argued.
Gavarone said the process reduces turnout and creates confusion among voters and administrators. Apparently referencing a forthcoming article, she argued 1 in 20 voters mismark their ballot in some way.
She added that in 2024, several states with ballot measures enacting a ranked choice system rejected those proposals.
DeMora defended their bid to deprive ranked-choice municipalities of state funding.
'It doesn't outlaw them, it doesn't say they can't do it. It just withholds state funds for those that do it,' he said. 'May sound harsh, but it's necessary. Ranked choice voting is expensive, confusing, and time consuming.'
DeMora noted Cuyahoga County elections officials have testified elections equipment around Ohio isn't built to handle ranked choice elections. And he pointed to local elections in Portland, Oregon in which more than 100 candidates ran for city council and almost 20 ran for mayor.
'That's not voter empowerment. It's voter overload,' he argued, 'The result — roughly 20% of all Portlanders, did not vote for any council candidate, and nearly 15% didn't vote for mayor.'
Following the vote, Senate President Rob McColley argued that states that instituted ranked choice like Alaska have had buyer's remorse. Although the vote was close, Alaska voters actually decided to keep their ranked choice system last November.
Still, McColley argued ranked choice 'doesn't do what it markets itself as doing.' He rejected the idea that through multiple rounds of counting, ranked choice arrives at a winner with majority support.
'What you're doing instead is you're saying this is the person that people ranked in their top however many choices,' he said. 'It doesn't necessarily mean it's the best candidate, it doesn't necessarily mean that a majority got it.'
As the bill moved through committee, ranked choice supporters far outnumbered those speaking in favor of the ban.
The group Rank the Vote Ohio helped organize that opposition and advocates for ranked choice around the state. They've made some inroads, but those successes have been modest.
Charter review committees in two cities, Cleveland Heights and Lakewood, have recommended putting a ranked choice charter amendment on the ballot. A handful of others are considering similar moves, and organizers are trying advance a charter amendment in Cincinnati.
Rank the Vote Ohio Executive Director Denise Riley said Gavarone and DeMora are presenting an incorrect account of ranked choice voting 'to justify subverting the Ohio Constitution to suppress voters' choices.'
'These senators have ignored the pleas from their constituents to stop spreading electoral disinformation, despite ample testimony refuting their lies,' she argued.
Riley pushed back on claims that ranked choice delays results.
'The majority of RCV jurisdictions,' she said, 'release preliminary results the night of or day after the election, just as other cities do.'
Riley noted delays often have to do with allowing time for absentee ballots to arrive, not the time it takes to tabulate ballots
Riley rejected claims that procedure reduces participation, pointing to Maine's nation-leading turnout in 2022 and a report published by the American Bar Association. She dismissed arguments about voter confusion noting several states in which exit polling showed voters understood what they were doing.
'Hopefully the Ohio House and Governor Mike DeWine won't be tricked into subverting the Ohio Constitution based on lies,' Riley said.
For what it's worth, the sponsors' testimony was at times misleading. Although several states did reject ranked choice voting last year, two of those cited by Gavarone (Montana and Arizona) weren't voting on ranked choice — they were considering different versions of open or so-called 'jungle' primaries.
That approach puts candidates from all parties on a single ballot with some number of top vote-getters advancing to the general election.
And DeMora's complaints about voters not casting a ballot in a given race, known as an undervote, is at best disingenuous. He misspoke when it comes to Portland's mayoral race — the analysis from OregonLive he relied on put the mayoral undervote at 11%, not 15%. Based on a comprehensive report from county election officials it appears that count includes undervotes and overvotes, where a voter marks two candidates at the same rank. The actual undervote was less than 7%.
Regardless, it's not uncommon at all in local races for voters to leave a race blank. Consider the 2023 mayoral and city council races right here in Columbus. Roughly 15% of voters left the mayor's race blank — the same amount DeMora mistakenly cited in Portland. And in Columbus' city council races, the undervote was staggering. While Portland saw roughly 20% of voters leave council races blank, in Columbus the undervote ranged from 44%-77%.
Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE