Ranked Choice Voting Is the Wrong Choice for New Jersey Voters

New Jersey’s elections should be simple, fair, and easy for voters to understand. Ranked Choice Voting fails that basic test.

Before serving in the Legislature, we both served in local government, one of us on the Lower Township Council and as Mayor, the other on the Ocean City Council. We ran elections, talked to voters face-to-face, and saw firsthand how people engage with the process. What voters want is clarity and confidence that their vote counts. Ranked Choice Voting delivers neither.

RCV replaces straightforward elections with complicated ballots, multiple rounds of tabulation, and delayed results. In cities where it’s been adopted, thousands of ballots have been thrown out or “exhausted” because voters didn’t rank candidates correctly or their choices were eliminated. That means real people show up to vote and their votes never count in the final result.

Supporters call this “reform.” We call it an experiment on voters.

Ranked Choice Voting also makes elections harder to administer and easier to distrust. When results take days or weeks to finalize, public confidence suffers. At a time when faith in elections is already fragile, New Jersey should not be adding confusion and complexity.

There are better ways to strengthen democracy: improving voter access, investing in election security, and making sure every voter understands the ballot they’re casting.

Your vote should count once, clearly, and transparently. Ranked Choice Voting undermines that promise and that’s why we oppose it.