Takeaways
- Many conservatives in Utah were early supporters of ranked choice voting, especially after they saw how well it worked in the Utah Republican Party caucuses and conventions.
- Utah Republicans appreciated how ranked choice voting decreased vote splitting, increased voter choice, promoted more positive campaigns, and reduced costs.
- The state’s municipal pilot project, in which cities and towns could opt in to trying ranked choice voting for their own local elections, helped build public familiarity with and enthusiasm for ranked choice voting.
- Unfortunately, in the latter years of the pilot, national partisan pressures overwhelmed local support for the reform, despite voters in conservative cities expressing support for ranked choice voting.
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January 1, 2026, marked the conclusion of a remarkable experiment in American ranked choice voting. A bipartisan bill passed by the Utah legislature in 2019 led some of the state’s reddest cities to adopt a ranked choice voting pilot, a program widely appreciated by their mostly Republican voters. These cities reduced their election costs by 40 percent, had fewer low-plurality winners, improved representation, and saw more positive campaigns.
At the program’s zenith, 23 Utah cities opted to use ranked choice voting methods in their elections, and voters largely approved. Polling found that a majority of voters enjoyed using ranked choice voting, more than 75 percent found it easy to use, a majority were more likely to vote for their preferred candidate, and a majority wanted to continue to use ranked choice voting in local elections.
Out of the 23 participant cities, 13 were in counties that cast ballots for President Trump in 2024. In the two inaugural cities, nearly 70 percent of voters voted Republican. Moreover, most of the champions of the policy in Utah are card-carrying Republicans. Yet in recent years, the national Republican Party’s official stance on ranked choice voting has soured. Increased partisanship on the issue led to the pilot project sunsetting in 2025, contrary to the values and wishes of its many conservative proponents.
How and why did a very red state come to embrace ranked choice voting? What impeded its broader adoption? And as the pilot concludes, what lessons might fellow conservatives draw from Utah’s experience? To find out, Sightline spoke with four key players who have helped bring ranked choice voting to the state.1
Bipartisan origins and the “Utah Way”
The Utah ranked choice voting experiment is notable not only for its popularity among conservative-leaning voters, but also for its origin story. While parties are becoming more polarized in their attitudes toward ranked choice voting today, Utah’s experiment began with a notable display of bipartisanship in 2017. The bill to usher in ranked choice voting in Utah was the brainchild of the most progressive member of the state house—and the most conservative.
Former Rep. Marc Roberts had been a proponent of ranked choice voting since using the method himself in Utah Republican Party caucus meetings: “In my neighborhood caucus, the precinct chair was a huge proponent of ranked choice voting. He was the one that introduced me to it. We would use it every now and then in our county convention and even the state convention. I loved it because, from a voter’s perspective, I hated being stuck in a situation where I got to pick between the worse of two evils.”
Roberts attempted to advance the policy when first elected to office but faced strong pushback from county clerks, who argued that it would be far too expensive to implement, given the limitations of their voting equipment. Undeterred, when it came time to solicit proposals for new voting equipment, Roberts ensured the new machines would be ranked choice voting-compatible.
Former Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck, who served as the Minority Whip for the Democrats at the time, became curious about ranked choice voting while serving on a commission to strengthen Utah’s democracy. She viewed it as a way to increase Utah’s voter participation levels and electoral competition in a state where a small number of Republican primary voters can effectively determine outcomes.
The two lawmakers realized they were aligned on the issue when Chavez-Houk filed a bill on the topic. Roberts reached out, telling Chavez-Houck, “Look, I’ve been at this for three years. Here’s the lay of the land, and here’s what I’ve tried. I’m more than happy to help co-sponsor this thing.”
Roberts and Chavez-Houck joined forces. The bill sailed through the state house, backed by some of the most conservative members at the time, many of whom strongly favored local control of election methods. “It was awesome,” recalled Roberts, and the novelty of the bipartisan collaboration helped sell the idea to wavering lawmakers. Chavez-Houck agreed. “We like to talk about the ‘Utah Way’ here,” she noted. “It’s the idea that Utahns’ compromise and find solutions to tough problems, and this was a great example.”
The bill ran into headwinds in the Senate, where it stalled on a deadlocked vote in committee until former Utah Republican Party Chair, Stan Lockhart, agreed to lobby on its behalf. Lockhart had a strong reputation as a trustworthy member of the conservative establishment, and his advocacy helped overcome other senators’ doubts, even if some still harbored lingering misgivings. Lockhart pushed for a compromise in the form of a municipal pilot project, whereby cities could opt in or out of using ranked choice voting in their elections.
A practical, cost-saving solution to electoral problems
Roberts, Lockhart, and other conservative allies of the movement found their way to ranked choice voting through their years of political experience. They saw the reform as a pragmatic solution to improving representation, an incentive for more civility in campaigns, and a no-brainer for saving taxpayers money. In terms of political philosophy, ranked choice voting also aligned better with the type of election they believed the Founders intended.
Crucially, many Utah elected representatives already had experience using ranked choice voting in party caucuses and conventions. In the early 2000s, Utah Republicans would hold local caucuses to determine who would represent them at the state party convention, where delegates would often select Republican nominees for statewide office. Needless to say, this nomination process led to lots of rounds of voting.
Stan Lockhart experienced ranked choice voting firsthand in 2002 during a Republican Party convention where they needed to determine nominees for at least a dozen seats. “It took what would have been a 12-hour convention, and got us out of there in three,” recalled Lockart. He had observed ranked choice voting at work again during the nomination for governor in 2004 but remained a skeptic. “I still wasn’t won over! It took the party using it for 10 to 12 years for me to warm up to it. That’s just how conservatives are.”
Even with his reservations, Stan eventually determined that ranked choice voting was a superior method. Around 2014, Utah Republicans were growing troubled by the effects of recent voting reforms that allowed candidates to qualify for the primary ballot by gathering signatures, leading to plurality outcomes. Candidates were winning primaries with 20–30 percent of the vote, and elections were vulnerable to spoilers. In an op-ed in a local newspaper in 2017, Chavez-Houck and Roberts made the case that ranked choice voting would make for a much more functional primary process to determine a replacement for Fmr. Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s seat. In imagining a ranked choice voting world, they wrote, “There would be no ‘spoiler’ candidates; everyone could vote for the candidate they supported without fear that they were helping elect the person they liked least. The winner would have majority support.”
Kelleen Potter, the former Republican mayor of Heber City, Utah, and Executive Director of Utah Ranked Choice Voting, especially liked that ranked choice voting gave candidates a reason to talk to everyone, not just their party’s base. “As a candidate, even if you’re not someone’s favorite, you want to be their second choice, so you go and knock on the door of the person with the lawn sign for your opponent.” She believes that this incentive structure should translate into more goodwill and civility in campaigns.
Potter is not alone. Current Utah Attorney General and former Utah Republican Party Chair Derek Brown agreed in a 2020 interview about the party’s nomination process: “It was much more civil in the convention [when ranked choice voting was used],” he said. “And it’s interesting now [in the primary] without ranked-choice voting, there’s a lot more animosity.”
Potter believed that the cost-effectiveness of ranked choice voting made the pilot option attractive to cities. “Some cities did it because they were super small. They wanted to save the cost of a primary and avoid dragging out the process for so long.” Indeed, a 2025 FairVote analysis found that Utah’s ranked choice voting pilot program cut the cost of local elections by 40 percent and saved taxpayers $800,000.
“It was much more civil in the convention [when ranked choice voting was used],” he said. “And it’s interesting now [in the primary] without ranked-choice voting, there’s a lot more animosity.”
Finally, support for ranked choice voting among Utah lawmakers and activists was as much philosophical as it was pragmatic. In Lockhart’s words, “We have a representative republic, which puts enormous importance on elections. It’s the only time when citizens can directly express their will. Shouldn’t we be trying to capture that as purely as possible?”
Getting a key clerk to champion the pilot
Utah’s state legislature enshrined the ranked choice voting municipal pilot in law, but implementation was still a challenge. There was tremendous opposition to ranked choice voting among a few key stakeholders—campaign consultants, many incumbent politicians, and, critically, county clerks. Initially, no clerk was willing to administer a ranked choice voting election, even if the cities voted to try it.
Lockhart eventually found his champion in a newly elected clerk in Utah County, Amelia Powers Gardner. Unlike many public servants, Powers Gardner hailed from the private sector. She had previously worked in engineering and business development with Caterpillar and was open to trying new things. In a 2020 interview with the local television station, Powers Gardner quipped, “A lot of my peers are very resistant to ranked choice voting, but my peers are resistant to all change.”
Vineyard and Payson, two highly conservative Utah cities, became the first to try ranked choice voting. They found they could use their regular equipment and that the tabulation process did not take long. After Vineyard trialed ranked choice voting for its City Council election, City Recorder Pamela Spencer recalled for the Salt Lake Tribune, “We didn’t have any problems. People understood it. We had maybe two phone calls about it.” Additionally, ranked choice voting halved Vineyard’s election budget by eliminating a primary.
Utah’s ranked choice voting pilot program cut the cost of local elections by 40 percent and saved taxpayers $800,000.
Later, Powers Gardner and her team would share what they had learned from the experience, establishing a playbook and offering support to other cities who were interested. Powers Gardner’s willingness to take the leap and share resources helped trigger wider uptake, and the pilot grew from 2 cities to 23 at its peak.
Survey says: Utahns overwhelmingly liked ranked choice voting
So, what did the voters think of their experience using ranked choice voting? In 2024, Utah Valley University’s Herbert Institute published a report parsing the results of opinion surveys on this issue conducted in 2021 and 2023. In 2023, they found that
- 94 percent of voters in cities using ranked choice voting were satisfied with their voting method;
- 82 percent said ranked choice voting was easy to use; and
- 67 percent said they were more likely to vote for their favorite candidate than they would be in single-choice elections.
Additionally, the Sutherland Institute, Utah’s oldest conservative public policy think tank, released its own survey report that broadly corroborated these strong results. The topline finding: 60 percent of likely Utah voters believed that ranked choice voting should remain an option for Utah cities and towns.
The report also concluded, “Voters who said they had participated in a ranked choice vote process were more likely to support it as a voting method than those who had never used it. This increased support is consistent across all election types.” A Sutherland Institute vice president would ultimately speak out against efforts in the legislature to end the pilot early.
End of the road: National pressures bear down on Utah
Despite state-wide pride in “The Utah Way,” Utah was not immune to the influence of national politics. “As soon as Trump blamed ranked choice for Sarah Palin’s loss in Alaska—well, that was the end of ranked choice voting in Utah,” lamented Stan Lockhart. In January 2023, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution condemning ranked choice voting without debate, according to Lockhart. The number of participating cities in Utah dropped from 23 to 12, then to 4.
Kelleen Potter thinks that the Utah ranked choice voting pilot was made more vulnerable by the fact that the state had passed its initiative relatively quickly and easily. “Now that I’ve been involved in this issue nationally, I’ve realized most states have had to build up a big grassroots effort before they even get to legislation. We just skipped that step and have had to educate people post-fact.”
When criticism of ranked choice voting came from the national party, the lack of context made it easier for people to sort it into a partisan bucket. According to Potter, “The attitude became, ‘You’re a good Republican—you’re not supposed to like ranked choice voting.’” Recent political science literature largely backs these observations about the power of the national parties to shape voters’ perceptions of ranked choice voting. When party elites condemn a policy, party members tend to adopt the same stance.
The party polarization of ranked choice voting was a frustrating turn in the discourse for Utah Republican ranked choice voting proponents, not least of all because they thought their own party allies were misunderstanding the core proposition of the reform. Marc Roberts argues that the system better reveals the preferences of the electorate, and by extension, he thinks it likely would serve to elect more Republicans in Utah, rather than fewer, given that it’s such a conservative state (research bears out his theory).
Roberts felt that conservative critics of ranked choice voting often self-sabotaged their engagement with ranked choice voting. According to Roberts, in Sandy, one of the larger participant cities, detractors waged a campaign urging voters to only select one candidate and to avoid ranking their choices in an eight-person race. As a result, a Democrat narrowly won the mayoralty in the conservative city, and voters were unenthused by the process. In Roberts’ words, “There was a lot of stuff on social media that was designed to confuse voters, so they didn’t really know how to approach the election. It was unfortunate.”
Republican ranked choice voting backers were also hearing from their colleagues that they were under enormous pressure from national groups, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the national Republican Party to oppose ranked choice voting in Utah. Potter recalled one incident at a Republican women’s conference where attendees castigated a Utah city councilmember for her defense of ranked choice voting. “They were going on about how Utah gets an F in elections because we had ranked choice voting, and she stood up and said my city loves it. We saved a ton of money! And she got really harassed for that.” The ordeal was alarming enough that the councilmember attempted to recruit the help of Utah US Senator Mike Lee to urge the national activists to stop upbraiding local officials.
According to Potter, vocal individual detractors mobilized by misleading information would passionately appeal to city councils to drop the pilot, and they often succeeded. Regarding this constituent pressure, Roberts recalled, “It doesn’t matter how much data or information you give someone. Emotionally, they’ve already made up their mind. There was a small group of people in Utah that would just go around all these city council meetings, not even their own cities, and be loud and rile people up. Some even sent scary emails. I think a lot of city councilmen decided they didn’t want to deal with it.”
Stan Lockhart also found national influence from pro-ranked choice voting actors more of a hindrance than a help. He thought national funders pushed too fast to launch citizen initiatives in other states and that doing so helped meld the ranked choice voting brand with progressivism. “I think the lesson here is that reformers need to be patient. Conservatives will default to the traditional mode of doing things if they see too much changing too fast.”
Lockhart recalled his own initial skepticism of ranked choice voting: “As a conservative, if someone brings you something you’re unfamiliar with, you are suspicious. You’re wondering what they know that you don’t. This runs through your head, even as you’re seeing good evidence. It was only when I finally did a deep dive for myself with a trusted friend that the scales tipped for me.”
Moving forward, a call for strategic patience
“As our society becomes more and more polarized, people will look for ways to turn down the heat in our political system, and ranked choice voting might end up being an acceptable reform to both parties.”
Today, the ranked choice voting advocates in Utah believe now is a moment for strategic patience. “Party loyalty won out over people’s willingness to dig into the nerdy election details,” reflected Potter. “So right now, it’s time for us to weather the storm.”
Chavez-Houck believes there’s lots they can do to sow their message in the meantime. “We need to document our work so that others can replicate and build upon it when the time is right. We also need to invest in the next generation.” She believes they can foster civic education on voting methods at Utah’s colleges and universities and perhaps encourage student groups to try ranked choice voting for their own elections. There’s also hope in pushing a legislative provision enabling the cities who have been using ranked choice voting to continue doing so. “Now that everyone is used to using it, they don’t want to give it up.”
Despite the pilot sunsetting, there likely remains a large constituency that prefers ranked choice voting to the alternative. Roberts concluded, “I think there’s a lot of people that experienced it and liked it—both as candidates and voters, and a lot of people will want to see it again.” He and his collaborators also see the tides beginning to change among national groups like ALEC, where pro-ranked choice voting conservatives successfully struck anti-ranked choice voting language from model voting reform legislation in a recent meeting. “There are people on those committees now that are supportive of what we’re trying to do.”
When asked what gives him hope for this reform, Stan Lockhart pointed to the big picture. “As our society becomes more and more polarized, people will look for ways to turn down the heat in our political system, and ranked choice voting might end up being an acceptable reform to both parties. It’s a long-term play to fix the incentives and make elections better.”
Thanks to Robyn Sundlee for her contributions to this article.
Related: What’s Different in Alaska Since Election Laws Changed | How Alaskans have responded to nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice voting.
