A sign directing voters to the polling station at the Thomasville Recreation Center in Atlanta on Nov. 4, 2025. Alander Rocha/Georgia Recorder
Voter fatigue in Georgia is real. Last Tuesday’s primary election was just the beginning.
Multiple contests – including for Republican primaries for U.S. Senate and governor – are headed to a June 16 runoff election.
Georgia law requires candidates to receive a majority of the vote (50% plus one) to win an election, thus forcing runoff elections if no candidate secures that majority. Most U.S. states only require a plurality to win: the candidate who earns the most votes wins outright.
Close races in recent Georgia elections – and crowded primaries – mean frequent runoffs. That’s more money and effort to conduct the election, more spending and TV ads by candidates, and another time voters head to the polls.
Getting a majority of the vote is a good thing. It forces a candidate to win over a majority of voters casting ballots rather than winning by a lower threshold.
The cost of a runoff
But runoff elections are annoying – and costly. Kennesaw State University researchers estimated the cost of the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff election at $75 million.
There’s a better way
Ranked-choice voting is a better alternative. It still forces the ultimate winner to earn a majority of the vote but eliminates the need for a second election. Instead of selecting one candidate in each race, voters rank candidates in order of preference. This is helpful in a primary election when voters may have difficulty selecting one candidate out of many. Seven Democrats and eight Republicans ran for governor in this month’s primary. Ranking candidates does not force voters to pick one, when they may like several candidates, but instead allows voters to rank from their favorite to least favorite.
The best part of ranked-choice voting, sometimes called instant runoff voting, is that voters only have to show up to the polls once. If no candidate wins outright, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and those rankings redistributed among the remaining contenders. This process is repeated until a candidate surpasses 50% and is declared the winner.
Alaska and Maine have already adopted ranked-choice voting, as well as cities like New York City and San Francisco.
Changing voting systems does not come without hurdles. State legislators would first need to introduce a bill to do so. A new system would also require educating the general public about its ins and outs. Lt. Governor Burt Jones even backed a bill in 2024 to ban ranked-choice voting, citing “voter confusion” and “political manipulation.”
But a change of this magnitude is necessary and has huge benefits: millions of taxpayer dollars saved on conducting elections, less campaign spending and ads, no going back to the polls a second time.
It feels like we are more polarized than ever when it comes to politics. But something most Georgians can agree on: we all have voter fatigue, and we’re sick of the TV ads.
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