Competitive Races With More Choices See Improved Participation

A great review of this subject comes from a really interesting article by Jonah Harwood at FairVote, a 501 organization that advocates electoral reform. Take a look at this excerpt:

Usually, elections in the U.S. are dominated by fields with only two candidates who are seen as viable – particularly in general elections.  Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows larger fields of candidates to run in a race without producing a spoiler effect. A look at a number of these RCV elections shows that large fields of candidates actually cause more voters to participate in those races.

An “undervote” occurs when a voter casts a ballot, but skips a particular race. For instance in the 2020 general election, a ballot which cast only a vote for President and left all local and state level races blank would be counted as an undervote for all those races. Lower quantities of undervotes indicate that more of the voters which cast a ballot chose to vote for that race in particular.

Also see related Democracy Chronicles articles like those on Voting Methods, Direct Democracy, and definitely checkout our main Voting Methods section.