Utah House votes to end ranked choice voting option for cities because vibes 

Utah cities would be stripped of the option to use a ranked-choice ballot in their 2025 municipal elections under a bill that passed out of the House on Thursday.

A pilot program allowing ranked choice voting—also known as instant-runoff voting—is set to expire in 2026. But critics say they've seen enough to know the pilot is a failure and the dozen or so cities that want to continue experimenting with RCV should be prevented from doing so.

"I believe in local control for a lot of things, but I don’t think elections should be one of them," said Rep. Katy Hall, the sponsor of HB290. "This is confusing for voters and leads to disenfranchisement and lower voter participation."

During debate on the House floor and in committee, Hall pointed to the drop in participating cities between 2021 and 2023—from 23 to 12—as the only quantifiable evidence against the pilot program. Beyond those numbers, Hall largely relied on anecdotes from critics, strained interpretations of voter turnout and a resolution adopted by the Utah Republican State Central Committee opposing ranked voting to suggest widespread distaste for RCV, despite contradictory testimony from some municipal leaders who said their experience was positive and that most of their constituents would like to continue using the alternative ballot method.

"Ultimately, this decision should be left to local governments to decide," Midvale Mayor Marcus Stevenson told members of the House Government Operations Committee last week. "We are the governments closest to the people."

The committee hearing on the bill also included several unchallenged mischaracterizations of RCV by those supporting its revocation, including a representative of the Utah Eagle Forum who falsely described ballots being thrown out and Utahns being disenfranchised if a voter chooses to not rank candidates beyond their first choice. In actuality, such a ballot would only be excluded from subsequent voting rounds if the voter's preferred choice was a losing candidate, as votes cast for a leading candidate remain in that person's tally during additional rounds of tabulation.

Put simply: you only "lose" your vote if you only vote for the loser, not unlike the dynamic of a traditional election. But Hall said that inconsistency between cities creates unnecessary confusion and distrust of the state's election processes.

"Stopping this program one election cycle earlier than it would sunset is the prudent thing to do," Hall said.

Debate on the House floor was brief, with most of the lawmakers who stood to speak expressing their opposition to the bill and their support for allowing the pilot to proceed as planned. Rep. Doug Welton, R-Payson, noted that pilot was intended to conclude with an in-depth review of the program's results during the legislative interim, and suggested that RCV critics were being selective in their evidence, like an oft-cited drop in voter turnout in Lehi that was nonetheless higher than its neighboring cities that didn't participate in ranked-choice balloting.

"I think those are kind of cherry-picked data," Welton said. "We’ve got one more election cycle, that’s all that we have to go."

Rep. Jeff Stenquist, R-Draper, noted that any city that objects to RCV is already free to utilize a traditional ballot. The effect of HB290, he said, was to prevent ranked-choice voting in those cities that would otherwise prefer it.

"I don’t think it's fair for us to take that option away from the cities that do want to participate," Stenquist said. "I think this bill is, at best, unnecessary. And we’ve got a lot of bills that we need to get through the Senate."

Other lawmakers argued that RCV was simply bad and needs to go, while offering little explanation beyond personal preference for that position. North Logan Republican Rep. Mark Peterson said Utah isn't the only state to experiment with ranked-choice balloting, and broadly characterized the national experience as negative.

"We see that it's failed in many of those locations," Peterson said. "I would urge that we end this pilot."

HB290 will now move to the Senate for its consideration. While Hall is a freshman lawmaker in the House, the bill's Senate sponsor is Rep. Ann Millner, R-Ogden, one of the highest ranking members of that chamber.