From staff reports OKLAHOMA CITY – Thirty legislators signed on with state R ep. Eric Roberts (R-Oklahoma City), the Assistant Majority Whip, to support the ban on ranked-choice voting in Oklahoma. House Bill 3156 was approved by Gov. Kevin Stitt on April 29.
Ranked-choice voting, explained a House press release, requires voters to designate their top choice in a race, their second choice and so on down the ballot.
“Ranked-choice voting makes voting more confusing and has delayed election results everywhere it has been tried,” Roberts said in the release. “We need to preserve the simplicity and timeliness of our current elections, along with our current ease in doing hand recounts when needed.”
Roberts gave the example of a ballot with five offices. If each office has four candidates, he said, each voter would be expected to review and rank four candidates for each race, which is a total of 20 votes. If no candidate receives a majority, the least popular candidate is then eliminated and their voters would have their votes reallocated to their second-choice candidate, with the process repeating until one candidate has a majority.
In addition, the process requires specialized computer software to handle the reallocation of votes from one candidate to another. In an interim study last year, Oklahoma State Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said the adoption of rankedchoice voting would necessitate the replacement of all state election machines, including new computer software, with an estimated cost of 'tens of millions of dollars.'
Five states— Florida, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Tennessee— banned ranked-choice voting prior to Oklahoma.
“For the security, for the validity of our elections, we need to have a uniform system,” said state Sen. Brent Howard (R-Altus) in an article posted April 26 on the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’ website.
Oklahoma did have a brief brush with ranked-choice voting about 100 years ago which required voters to rank half of all the ca ndidates in primary elections. It was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme
Court in 1926.