A discussion on ranked choice voting turned contentious at a Heber City Council meeting, and a kerfuffle among council members caused more confusion on the topic, where facts were inconsistent throughout the evening.
Heber City has used ranked choice voting for elections in previous years, including in 2021 and 2023, and the agenda item on March 4 was to decide whether to keep the system going through this year’s races. Both the mayor and two council members will be on the ballot. Park City, Coalville, Oakley and Hideout are also weighing whether or not to implement ranked choice voting in their elections.
Council members did not make a decision on the matter Tuesday and pushed the vote to April.
Wasatch Taxpayers Association’s Tracy Taylor and former Utah County Clerk Josh Daniels presented two opposing viewpoints.
Taylor was of the opinion that ranked choice voting “creates many new opportunities to make a mistake” and that the system may be discriminatory against senior voters or neurodivergent individuals.
“It causes confusion, and they may stop trying to vote. That, I believe we can all agree, is not a good thing,” Taylor said.
Wasatch County residents like Maddie Kirby and Mike Hewlett voiced their support of Taylor’s presentation.
“I would like you to also reject ranked choice voting because it’s very, very confusing,” Kirby said. “Why do we want to confuse this very simple process of voting?”
Taylor said that ranked choice voting allows more candidates on the ballot, which means that it would “take more time to research” prior to elections. She also referred to the states that have been on the trend of banning ranked choice voting. In July, 2024, Missouri joined nine other Republican-led states in prohibiting the voting method.
The echoing sentiment of “one person, one vote” among leaders in those states was reiterated by Taylor. Daniels, however, clarified that, in cases where courts have reviewed rank choice voting in response to lawsuits, “the court has said quite clearly that ranked choice elections do not violate the previous constitutional case about one person, one vote.”
Daniels said that, in researching ranked choice voting options, ballots were taken to senior centers and high schools to poll how confusing the method might actually be.
“We purposely gave them zero instructions about ranked choice voting and how to mark the ballot, and our intent was to gauge if the ballot itself was intuitive enough to assuage any sort of confusion,” Daniels said. “We actually didn’t discern any confusion.”
That point in particular boiled over for Mayor Heidi Franco and Councilor Scott Philips.
“The sad truth of it is that the under-votes are showing that the real majority in our city do not either want it to be forced or they’re confused, right? They’re exhausted. Is that acceptable to us?” Franco said, adding that she believed voters would have to rank every candidate on their ballot.
Phillips disagreed, arguing that residents should be able to figure out ballot instructions. Residents later called him out for his “argumentative attitude.”
“I really like the ranked choice voting system in that you truly get a majority of the voters to select the candidates at hand … in ranked choice, voting allows for an actual majority to select the people that are put in office,” Phillips said. “People know they don’t have to vote for every candidate.”
On a ranked choice voting ballot, instructions for voters are listed at the top, indicating that voters can rank “as many or as few candidates as you would like” and that voters should not vote for more than one candidate in each column.
Trina Cooke said that this November will be her fourth election as Heber City’s recorder. Ultimately, Cooke said that the cost savings to the city was about 50% for the ranked choice ballot, as opposed to the standard ballot that was issued in her first election working for the city.
She said that not having to do a primary was “beneficial to the candidates” and that “camaraderie and politeness was excellent with ranked choice voting, not that it wasn’t kind or contentious with other voting.”
Kelleen Potter, who presented with Daniels, explained the issues facing the counties that are choosing to avoid the ranked choice method. County clerks, she said, are not willing to face the backlash coming from residents in those communities.
“I have several cities right now that want to do it, and the county clerks won’t do it because they don’t want to be criticized or make a mistake or add one more variable to what they’re already dealing with, with people accusing them of not running elections with integrity,” Potter said.
When it comes to under-votes, Daniels said that all elections have both under-votes and over-votes, whether there’s a ranked choice method or not.
Ultimately, Mayor Franco and Councilors Yvonne Barney and Aaron Cheatwood voiced their wariness to implement ranked choice voting long term.
“I think ranked choice is a great idea, but it doesn’t make any sense to me bouncing from ranked choice to normal, back and forth,” Cheatwood said. “I think it’s a great option, but I’m ready to deny it.”
Barney and Franco both said the method was facing too much opposition from the community.
“I don’t like ranked choice voting … I don’t know how many [emails] Aaron got, but I got 12 of them that said no to ranked choice voting and four that said yes,” Barney said. “I feel that if it was so popular, that more would have come out and said ‘yes.’”
While no motion was made to pass or deny the voting method, a unanimous vote was passed to delay the decision until April 15. Heber City, in the meantime, will release a survey to residents on the matter and wait to analyze those results.