The Appeal of Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked Choice Voting has been in the news again, this time due to the primary race for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. Ekosj got the ball rolling on this topic in this post. He does a fine job of explaining how it works, but I'll explain it in my own words if you don't want to go read his post.

Let's say six people are in a race. Your ballot looks like this.

___ Tammy
___ George
___ Waylon
___ Dolly
___ Crystal
___ Ronnie

If your position is that there is only one acceptable candidate and you'll go to hell before you would give a vote to anyone else, that's fine. You can just give somebody a number 1 and be done. But you can choose to vote for 2 or 3 or all the candidates, ranking them in order of preference.

Let me go ahead and fill out my sample ballot.

_6_ Tammy
_5_ George
_2_ Waylon
_4_ Dolly
_3_ Crystal
_1_ Ronnie

When the ballots are tabulated, if anyone in the #1 rank receives more than 50% of the total votes, the counting is done. That person is the winner. But if no one breached that threshold, the computer notes who the last-place finisher was and removes that person from contention. So let's say that Crystal came in last place. Sigh. When the recount is done, all votes for Crystal are ignored, regardless of where the rank is. Whoever is the highest-ranking person on the Crystal-free ballots is counted now. So all ballots that had Crystal as number 1, now get counted with the second choice as the vote that gets counted. If, after this tabulation, someone now cracks 50%, we have a winner. If not, whoever was ranked last in that round gets eliminated, and we go again. In a race with thousands (or millions!) of ballots, this would be a headache to handcount. But it's easy-peasy for computers.

What, you may ask, is the point of this complicated system? The goal is to elect people whom the majority of voters find supportable, even if the victor is not the person who the greatest number of people (but a minority) had as their favorite candidate. Think of it like this: We have a race with just three candidates, and are using the standard "first-past-the-post" method of tabulating votes. Candidate A gets 40% of the vote, B gets 28%, and C gets 32%. The people have spoken; they want A, right? Well, 40% do. Among the 60% who didn't vote for A, it might be that almost all think Candidate A is an absolute lunatic. Perhaps Candidate C has fewer people who love her, but most people find her acceptable.

Is this a stupid desire? Evidently so, given that at least 90% of my conservative brethren who have an opinion on the matter believe that RCV is somewhere between a communist plot and a satanic scheme. Curiously, I don't hear conservative outrage over those states that have mandatory run-off elections for some races, such as governor, when no candidate gets a majority. I guess the principle is OK there. When they have a run-off election, everyone but the top two candidates is eliminated, so only the top two candidates are on the new ballots. But now the state has to go through the expense of holding another election, and the voters have to take the time to come back to the polls and do it all over again. Ranked Choice Voting operates on the same principle as a run-off election, except that you do all your voting at once.

So, why do I like the concept of RCV? We live in a de facto two-party country. Sure, independents and people in other parties can run, but the two major parties do everything they can to make it difficult for them to get on the ballot. Even when I was quite involved in the Republican Party, I thought this was unfair.

RCV wouldn't change any of that, but it might give people more reason to listen to a few more ideas, from a few more candidates. We're all told - sometimes, angrily - that you must, must I say, vote for the donkey or the elephant. If you vote third party, you are throwing your vote away! The forcefulness with which some people insist on this makes one wonder if voting for a third-party candidate isn't almost an act of treason. And the fact that the vast majority of people believe that only a Democrat or Republican can win makes it the truth. Everyone is afraid to cast a vote for an independent because they don't want their vote to go to waste.

So, even if you think the Republican and Democratic candidates are dreadful, you pick one and don't bother looking into the other candidates at all. Why bother, since you aren't going to vote for any of them anyway? But if you have RCV, you now have the psychological freedom to vote for someone whom you actually want to see win, even though you know they won't. You can vote for one of the establishment party candidates in your second or third ranking, so once the truly decent person is eliminated, your vote gets counted for one of the turkeys who actually have a chance at winning. And if people feel free to vote for someone outside the R/D duopoly, they might listen to what some of these other candidates have to say. Some (probably most) of those candidates will be crackpots, of course. But some may have a few intelligent ideas that aren't being talked about in Republican and Democratic circles. I don't think that any political party has all the answers, and listening to a few more voices might yield a few decent ideas. Maybe the two major parties would learn a little bit by having the more detailed data that would result from an election with RCV.

Here's another reason I like this. Almost all of us have at one time or another cast a vote for someone we disliked because they were the lesser of two evils. Then that person wins by a handful of points and crows about how the people of New Jersey, Arkansas, or wherever elected him in a landslide, proving that Arkansas supports all of his policies to the hilt. In an RCV election, an unpopular victor will have a harder time persuading people of such BS when everyone knows that he was the first choice of only 31% of the state. Yes, Governor, you were the candidate that the greatest number of people found to be acceptable, but don't kid yourself that everyone loves you or every item in your agenda.

You may be saying to yourself, "But, Randy, you haven't heard any conservatives give you the reasons why ranked choice voting is awful." Yes, I have. I have read articles and listened to podcasts where my fellow conservatives have argued against it. I just haven't found them persuasive. And I don't expect to persuade anyone to come around to my way of thinking. But a friend asked why I like RCV, hence this post.