Ranked Choice Voting: We Want More Choices
In the US, our elections are often two-choices. We accept this duopoly of choices as the way things are and it has been that way since at least 1796. Today it’s Republicans vs Democrats, and whoever wins the primaries battle for the general election. We often end up with two choices whose skill is often access to money and support from the party; studies of election winners in congress show that more than 90% of the winners are the highest spenders. If a third enters the race with similar ideological views as another, they are often considered causing a spoiler effect. They will naturally take a portion of the votes from one or the other party in our current two-party system. Compared to an election with just two candidates, this would change the result — an spoil the result in the eyes of some. If you understand money’s influence in politics, you’ll understand that this is a threat to the current two-party duopoly. From the perspective of this two-party system, this 3rd person thereby spoiled the would-be winner. A 4th candidate would rarely enter any major race as a plurality of votes is required to win and too many candidates may make that impossible, triggering new elections. We often consider Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) as a way to move beyond a constant binary choice and ignore the spoiler effect by reducing the power of the party altogether. The Forward Movement maintains RCV at its core. We must analyze how its been done, understand the different implementation choices and prepare to measure its impact. Join me as I analyze how can we move forward with this new type of voting system, what system works best and how can we better explain how this works to the average voter.
Today’s Elections: Are We Already Making Enough Choices?
Today, most US elections, whether it is a primary election or a general election, are single-vote, single-outcome elections. In other words, the votes are counted once, a winner is decided and announced and eventually confirmed (major caveat: not all instances are so straightforward and a variety of reasons including close outcomes or court rulings can change some of these results, even leading to new elections; this represents a percentage much less than the majority of elections. For the sake of this article, I will stick with the majority of current elections.). Is this all there is to it? We must acknowledge that there is already a ranked choice system occurring before voters even get to the polls: the current primary system purports to provide the best candidate from each party, that is supposed to best represent the party. However, during these primary fights, there is already massive amounts of money being spent to change public opinion. Candidates drop out, due to scandals of their past or low polling numbers. Furthermore, Cable News Media doesn’t exist for the public good; they exists to make a profit and having a story that is divisive causes more viewership — even Facebook knows and utilizes this in their systems to drive up engagement. The two-party evolved to enact this purge down to one candidate, but ultimately ends up with providing candidates who are the most successful in three things: voter engagement (i.e. getting more people out to vote for them in the primary), raising money (often through big donor parties or by driving up divisiveness with voters) and political maneuvering inside the party system itself. Ranked Choice Voting looks to change that and give more choice to voters, which would drive up voter engagement and end up with a candidate that more voters prefer. The ultimate question is how can we measure the candidate that most voters prefer. To start, let’s look at what’s currently been tried.
Current RCV Data
The elections that have implemented Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) so far have utilized Hare RCV or “Instant-Runoff Voting”. This is the implementation many are already aware of: Rank your candidate choices, 1 through 5, and the lowest vote-getter gets eliminated each round until there is a winner. Let’s quickly walk through how that outcome could go in 5 rounds.
Sample Election: Hare RCV
In an election where you can rank up to 5 Candidates, the top five may have received an outcome like this:
This means that 45% of voters listed C1 as their #1 choice. The next closest was C2. Let’s continue to the next round of voting since C5 is eliminated. Those who voted for C5 as their #1 choice now add their #2 choice to their totals:
We now have a new category: Not Voted. Some of those who ranked C5 decided that they wouldn’t have voted in this election if C5 wasn’t even a choice. This will happen with RCV.
Even with C5’s votes have spread across the existing candidates, there is still no winner. Since C4 is now the lowest vote-getter, they will be eliminated and their #2 choices (along with C5’s #3 choices) will be added to the other candidates:
Elections require a more than 50% winner, and even after 3 rounds, no candidate has won a majority of votes. We are in Hare RCV, so we go until there is a winner. C3 is now eliminated, and their votes (along with C5’s #4 choices, and C4’s #3 choices) are distributed to who is left:
Just two candidates left; we’ve been including “Not Voted” in the outcome, but they ultimately do not get included in any votes. Removing “Not Voted”, we end up with a final Scaled Result:
In the final round, C2 wins even though they were in 2nd place the whole time. This is instant run-off, or Hare RCV, and most elections have used this method where this is possible. Even though it felt like C1 was in the lead the whole time, voters decided, by rank, that C2 was the candidate that most voters preferred.
This implementation creates numerous mini elections, with your voting choices are locked in for any implementation of that outcome. You choose up to 5 candidates and rank them in order, and understand that a quasi-new election will be held each round until one candidate wins a majority. You understand that your first choice candidate will be ignored if he loses, and you will move on to your 2nd or your 3rd. If you do not choose a 4th or 5th ranked candidate, your choice is also already decided: you decided you would not vote if that was the resulting election outcome. The logic is straightforward and the implementation is simple to clarify.
The Condorcet Method: An Argument for a pre-RCV step
The Condorcet Method is another RCV method with a twist. In this method, each candidate is first individually tested against each other candidate to see if one candidate is ranked higher than every other candidate. In other words, each candidate is tested as if they were in a one-on-one election with every other candidate. If one candidate wins all contests in this two-choice run-off, then they are considered the Condorcet winner. This is an interesting implementation, and I had not previously heard of this before writing this article. What was this new method and what does it truly represent?
Sample Election: Condorcet Method
Utilizing the same idea with 5 candidates, we would individually need to measure C1 against C2, C3, C4, and C5. Here’s how a sample one-on-one election would look like, for a candidate C1, who would automatically be announced the winner due to the results below:
One Election Out of 37
An analysis of historical elections that utilized Hare RCV found a single election out of 37 that did not elect the Condorcet winner: the 2009 Burlington Vermont Mayor. In this election, one candidate (Montroll) was eliminated, even though a one-on-one against either of the two candidates (Montroll vs Wright and Montroll vs Kiss) saw that Montroll would have won. In other words, the final round of this Ranked Choice Voting run-off was Wright vs Kiss, even though Montroll would have beaten either of them individually. Ultimately, this meant that, by the Condorcet method, Montroll was more preferred by either Wright or Kiss. This failure was also due to how some voters ranked candidates and their decision to not rank other candidates (i.e. deciding that they would sit out such an election). A large percentage of Wright’s voters did not rank beyond the semi-final round.
Adding an Extra two-candidate runoff Step
This proposed implementation inserts a new step that seems to pull us away from RCV; in this new method, you hold initial one-versus-one elections and ignore the very real possibility of the spoiler effect. Furthermore, this is a complicated implementation to explain, as it is an additional step to counting votes that would have to be explained to voters. Voting should be clear and straightforward, and any implementation of Ranked Choice Voting must also be easily understood.
The argument for the Condorcet method of counting is clear: you end up with the candidate who more people would have voted for, if that candidate wins every one-versus-one battle against every other candidate. In that way, you avoid the spoiler effect that occurred in Burlington’s 2009 Mayoral race. Since this yields the same outcome in at least 97% of elections studied, the outcome would almost always be the same. However, in this method, we sacrifice the whole essence of RCV by enforcing a one-on-one preliminary race, while increasing the difficulty in explaining how it all works. Creating a system that seems overly complex will drive people away from it.
Where We Go From Here
We are reimagining how voting works and are increasingly utilizing data to understand its impact. We want to implement RCV because we believe that we will have increased participation and impact by simply having more choices. RCV is a core component of the Forward Movement because it represents access to the candidate rather than the party. We are not so easily placed into two buckets. Ranked Choice Voting encourages us to become more involved in politics, not less. Voter apathy or anger due to the perceived extremes of two parties is not the way forward. We must work to change how we elect our leaders if we hope to have any chance of affecting real change.
Defenders of the way things are have always been relics of the past; society forever moves forward — whatever direction that may be — and our democracy has also adjusted accordingly. If we believe that Democracy represents the ability for us to choose how we’re governed, then we must simply consider this: do we want more choices or are you happy with the way voting happens now? Whatever choice we make, we always have the ability to make a new one in the future. That is the beauty of democracy: freedom to choose. Is now the time for more choices?
