The Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted on Aug. 15 to reject a rule proposed by its Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) that would have limited the use of ranked-choice voting for delegate allocation in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
The proposed rule, which the RBC passed at its May meeting, said that ranked-choice voting could not be used to express presidential preferences in the delegate allocation process, and if it was used pursuant to state law, only the first-preference votes would be used for delegate allocation.
Since the rule was not adopted by a vote of the full DNC, the delegate allocation process for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary will follow the same rules the party used in 2024, which required states to assign delegates to presidential candidates in proportion to the percentage of votes they receive in a primary, as long as a candidate receives 15% of the vote. Candidates who receive less than 15% of the vote are not awarded delegates.
