TIL: Ranked-Choice Voting in the Texas House

Source: The Texan.

The Texas House's first order of business of the 2025 term was to elect Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) Speaker in a runoff over David Cook (R-Mansfield). Ana-Maria Ramos (D-Richardson) had been eliminated after coming in third in the first round of voting.

That got me thinking about how this election might have played out if the Texas House used ranked-choice voting (my favorite system), sometimes called instant-runoff voting.

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My thinking requires some assumptions, but I feel these assumptions are pretty likely to be true. Let's assume that (almost) all Republicans preferred either Cook or Burrows over any Democrat. Let's further assume that (almost) all Democrats preferred a fellow Democrat over either Republican in the race, and preferred Burrows over Cook between the two Republicans. In most descriptions of ranked-choice voting, the Democrats would then have marked their ballots 1. Ramos, 2. Burrows, 3. Cook. That would have given Ramos 62 votes in the first round, with Cook and Burrows splitting the Republican votes, 54 to 34. That would have eliminated Burrows and set up a runoff between Ramos and Cook.

Assuming all the Republicans who voted for Burrows would have switched their vote to the other Republican in the race, Cook, that would have led to Cook winning a runoff against Ramos.

If so, ranked-choice voting would not have worked for the Democrats. It wouldn't have led to a win by their preferred second-ranked candidate, Burrows. They needed to rank their own party's candidate lower than their preferred Republican candidate. That's what enough of them did, and that's how the Democrats ended up with their second-ranked candidate becoming Speaker.

In an election of three candidates, A, B, and C, where A doesn't have a majority and supporters of B and C all prefer either to A, ranked-choice voting can ensure that A loses in a runoff no matter whether it's against B or C.

But in our case, it does matter whether the runoff is against B or C. B can win a runoff. C cannot. So as much as voters might want to vote for C, it's in their interest to vote for their second choice, B. As much as Democrats might have preferred Ana-Maria Ramos in this case, it was in their interest to vote for Burrows, not Ramos. That was the only way to avoid ending up with Cook, their third choice. That's known as tactical voting. In this case, I don't know of any voting system that "works" without tactical voting.

in summary, today I learned that ranked choice voting, while still having many good things about it, does not eliminate the need to make tactical voting choices in some situations.

"Ramos is our hope,
Yet Burrows holds stronger path,
Tactical votes sway."
—h/t ChatGPT