Where RCV Is In Use Now
In the United States
FairVote maintains a thorough list of locations in the United States that use ranked-choice voting.
Some of the locations include:
Maine: Through a ballot initiative, Mainers passed ranked-choice voting in 2016 and have been using the system since 2018 for state and federal elections. In 2020, Maine became the first state in the country to use RCV to determine which presidential candidate won their electoral college votes.
New York City: In 2019, New York voters passed an RCV ballot initiative by 74%. As a result, ranked-choice voting has been used for NYC local primary elections starting in 2021.
Alaska: In November 2020, Alaskans approved Ballot Measure 2 which, among other election reforms, switches Alaska from a regular first-past-the-post system to one with a nonpartisan top-four primary with ranked-choice voting. Alaska successfully held its first RCV elections in 2022.
Other Countries
Several countries around the world use or have used ranked-choice voting for years.
A few examples:
Australia has used RCV since 1918 and uses it in state and federal elections.
Ireland has been using RCV for all public elections since 1922, and RCV is in Ireland's Constitution.
Canada's political parties use ranked-choice voting to determine their leaders.
Papua New Guinea has used RCV since 2007. Voters in Papua New Guinea are able to rank their top three choices.
Fiji has used RCV since 1998. RCV is sometimes called instant-runoff voting.
Sri Lanka uses a slightly different preferential voting system in both single and multimember districts, depending on the office. Their system eliminates all but the top two candidates instead of repeatedly removing the candidates with the lowest votes.Â