Despite the upheavals of recent presidential election cycles, the most popular voting format in the US is undeniably simple … in theory: voters choose the candidate they like best, and whoever has the most votes in the end wins. (Unless they don’t.)
Despite its supposed simplicity, problems appear to exist, and critics continue to argue against many of the governing institutions of our system, from voter identification laws to campaign finance laws to the electoral college.
For these and other reasons, a new form of ranked voting is becoming increasingly popular in many U.S. cities, with the most populous city in the country – New York City – ready to begin the format in the upcoming Mayor’s competition on May 22nd). Though it’s not new – it’s well established in cities like Oakland, California and St. Paul, Minnesota, and it runs all of the federal elections in Maine, along with it Alaska will follow soon– Ranking voting is very different from the system many are used to in the US, but there is a lot to recommend.
And if it’s rated a success in New York, it could potentially gain even more credibility and expand to more cities, states, and school boards – possibly your own.
What is a ranking choice voting?
On the surface, the premise is simple: in an election with multiple candidates, voters rank their preferred decisions from favorite to least preferred. For example, in an election with eight candidates, a voter would hypothetically rank their preferences from one to eight.
G / O Media can receive a commission
The winner (or primary winners) is selected through a reallocation process in which candidates who finish last in each of several subsequent rounds of the vote count are gradually removed from the race. Voters who ranked a failed candidate first will then have their votes redistributed to the second candidate, and so on. The elimination process will continue until there is one candidate left. If a candidate wins a majority of the first choice votes from the jump, the second choice votes need not be counted.
This is a system that, given the various probabilities that may arise, enjoys a certain type of policy nod:
The theory behind the system is that it broadens the political spectrum by giving a wider range of candidates a fairer chance of winning office. How The New York Times explains:
The basic idea is to allow people to both choose their favorite candidate and indicate their preferences among the other candidates. This combination can allow the most widely recognized candidate to win the election while revealing the full range of voter views.
The number of participating candidates depends on the particular breed and the particular community. There are technically 13 politicians trying to become NYC’s top officials, though city rules allow only five of the most popular to be on the ballot on June 22nd.
What are the advantages of ranking choice voting?
From a strategic point of view, the ranking vote seeks to eliminate the possibility of two similar candidates stealing votes from each other and possibly giving victory to a candidate whose political positions are overall less popular. A classic example was the presidential election in 2000, in which Ralph Nader of the Green Party cut off a significant portion of Democrat Al Gore’s would-be votes. George W. Bush won the race by a smaller margin, and the rest is history.
The way the general majority winner system works can allow quite unpopular candidates to win elections before even considering the difficulties faced by the electoral college. As a non-partisan voting rights organization FairVote Notes, “[b]Between 1992 and 2019, 49 senators from 27 states were elected with less than 50 percent support. ”
Still, FairVote’s data shows that such victories are the exception rather than the rule. Synthesizing the data of the organization, Vox completed In most rankings there is usually a single majority winner anyway and notes: “In the USA there were 236 rankings with individual winners and at least three candidates. In 94 percent of cases, the candidate who gets the most votes in first place in the first ballot is the winner at the end of the day.
Some critics argue that the complexity the ranking selection system – and the rare occasions where it takes some complicated math to determine the real winner in a tight competition – is not what this country needs, especially in a time of deep –when made—Skeptic about the legitimacy of our elections.
And while no system is perfect, it is true that the wider range of candidates made viable through ranked voting could open the political field to a wider range of views – and perhaps apathetic voters back into the county and the voting booth could lure.
This post was edited after it was published to correct a bug regarding Maine’s use of the leaderboard selection only in federal elections.
