Ranked Choice Voting

One of the most common sentiments you hear every election is that most people don’t get to vote for someone they like, but rather are forced to pick between the lesser of two evils.

Why do we accept a system that leads us to feel that we’re voting for the person who is going to do the least bad instead of the most good? Our current plurality voting system, where everyone selects a single preference and then the person with the most votes wins, is viewed negatively by election scientists, for several reasons:

• • It’s vulnerable to a spoiler effect, where a third-party candidate can take just enough votes away from a candidate to cause them to lose, even if that candidate would be preferred to the eventual winner.
  • It can cause strategic voting, where voters don’t vote for their favorite but rather the person they like who is most likely to win.
  • Especially with a party-based primary system, it leads to partisanship, as centrist candidates, despite having wider support, lose out to candidates who appeal to the fringes of each party.

There are many alternative voting systems that are superior to plurality voting. We should move to a ranked-choice/single transferable vote voting system, a system that has recently been implemented in Maine and is being explored by many other localities.

In ranked-choice voting, each voter ranks their top three candidates, from 1 to 3. After this is complete, every voter’s first choice is tallied. If one candidate received over 50% of the vote, they win the election. If no candidate hit the majority threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then, everyone who listed that eliminated candidate as their first choice has their second choice considered, a process which continues until someone breaks 50%.

The benefits of this type of system include:

• Higher turnout. Ranked-choice voting in general elections is associated with a 10-point increase in voter turnout.
• Better capturing voter preferences. Since each voter is allowed to express how they feel about more candidates, the outcome tends to reflect the choices of voters better.
• Allows for more moderate candidates. A candidate that has broad, cross-aisle appeal is more likely to win using a ranked-choice voting system since voters can express their preference for a more partisan candidate as well as the more moderate choice.
• Lowers levels of negative campaigning. Since each voter can potentially vote for a candidate as well as their opponent, candidates shy from negative campaigning that would alienate the supporters of other candidates, instead trying to appeal to those voters as their second or third choice.