Question 5 on the Maine ballot is to implement ranked choice voting for all representative, senator, and governor’s elections in the future. I think this is a great idea, and it would have prevented the disasters that our last two gubernatorial elections were.
Is ranked choice the same thing as instant runoff voting and single transferable vote? If so, good on Maine, I hope it passes and spreads throughout the nation.
Portland, Maine already has ranked choice voting for th mayoral elections. http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/15/politics/portland-to-deploy-ranked-choice-voting-for-mayoral-election/
This is the exact same way other races will work if this referendum passes.
Outstanding idea, I hope it catches on. I hate the first past the post system. Is there bipartisan support for this sort of voting reform?
I’d suggest there would be bipartisan opposition to it. It only encourages multiple parties and as such would weaken the major parties.
But it dramatically reduces the chances of minor parties, independents or wingnuts serving as spoilers for the legitimately most-popular major-party candidates.
May I ask what disastors happened in the last 2 elections?
Yes, except that STV is the ranking procedure applied to multiple-candidate selections, as for proportional representation in a legislature. When STV is used to fill a single office, it is called IRV, or ranked-choice. (Some feel that the “instant” terminology is best avoided, because with a close race among several candidates, and physical balloting, it may take some time to get final results. You can’t work with just precinct totals, you need the exact ranking from every individual ballot.)
True, but it also helps representation more closely match the will of the people. Since demographics are shifting in favor of Democrats, and Republicans have a history of disenfranchisement with the voter ID laws, it wouldn’t surprise me if Republicans are more against this than Democrats are.
In 2010, Paul Lepage was elected with 38% of the vote in a five way race. He is a far rightist, who has done a lot of damage to our state. He threatens and insts everyone he doesn’t like. He is a racist blowhard, and doesn’t seem to care about laws. In 2014, he was reelected because liberals split their vote again. Out of state tea partiers backed independent Eliot Cutler to split the vote. He is IMO, a warning to te rest of the nation. Don’t elect Trump or our nation will be the laughingstock of the world.
Here in Minneapolis, we have used this voting system for several years.
As a Democrat, I would normally support this. For many statewide races, the votes for other than the 2 party D/R candidates would mostly be transferred to Democratic under STV (here in Minnesota).
But in areas dominated by one party (like here in Minneapolis – our city government is nearly all Democratic, the Green Party is second, and Republicans a third party), I have some concerns withe this voting method.
- It seems to offer an advantage to rich or big name candidates.
Previously, a candidate without personal wealth or name recognition could decide to run for office.
First, they had to gain endorsement by their chosen party. To do that, they had to persuade a limited number of people – a few hundred party delegates, known & politically active. You could do this with little money, just you & a few supporters contacting them.
Then they went to a Primary Election. Winning party endorsement brings campaign contributions from people, campaign workers from the party, and much more attention from the media. Plus the party Sample Ballot, which brings a lot of votes.
If you survive the Primary, you are one of 2 candidates for the General. You then get even more media attention, including from many voters who weren’t paying attention until now, plus additional campaign contributions.
So it’s possible to start with little money & a few supporters, and if you’re good enough, grow that into winning the election. But under IRV, most of that isn’t there: party endorsements are less meaningful, and there is no Primary. You have to campaign all the way to the November election, with nothing along the way to show your building support. So you need to start with a lot of money (either your personal wealth, or support from wealthy donors), or you need high name recognition (like many incumbents have). One activist referred to IRV as “Incumbents Forever” – in practice, that seems fairly accurate.
**- It encourages a huge number of candidates (thus less info on each). **
While any person should be able to run for office, by having no ‘elimination rounds’, IRV has them all staying on the ballot until the final election. But voters lead busy lives, and don’t have time to investigate them all. Plus normal information methods are clouded: A debate with 36 candidates is unfeasible, so the sponsors have to somehow choose who to leave out. Newspapers have only so much space for a Voters Guide, so very little info is given on each candidate. Radio & TV are even more limited. In practice, there is less information available to voters.
**- it discourages serious discussion of issues/differences in candidates. **
Because candidates want to also be a voters’ 2nd or 3rd choice, IRV was supposed to discourage negative campaigning. But in my opinion, it has discouraged serious discussion of issues or how you differ from other candidates. Candidates don’t want to offend any group of voters, so they stay with bland speeches and issues that everyone agrees with, with no discussion of how that goal will be actually accomplished (or paid for).
This is a common trait in politics already; I feel IRV has made it worse.
So while IRV sounds good in theory (or on a discussion board) I’m not sure it works that well in practice, especially in smaller, one-party areas.
If your candidate fields are too large, increase the signatures necessary to get on the ballot.
If your policy debates are too tepid, get debate moderators and journalists to probe more.
The above are pretty mild problems to have, by the way, as matters of electoral mechanics go.
Oakland’s 2010 election provides an amusing example of ranked choice voting. The 3 candidates were State Senator Don Perata, Rebecca Kaplan, and Jean Quan. Plus 6 others. Don Perata was an old hand in East Bay politics, recipient of numerous charges of corruption that never seemed to stick. Much of it was legal. A conservative Democrat, he was widely known as “The Teflon Don.” He outspent the others by wide margins. Would clean government win?
Rebecca Kaplan was an LGBT champion from MIT, Tufts University and Stanford Law School. An up and coming Democrat, not afraid to get a little scrappy. Jean Quan had been on the Oakland School Board for 12 years, the City Council, as well as a small probably unpaid appointment by the Clinton administration. Bo-ring!
Backed by generous funding by the city’s developers, the Teflon Don took the lead, eventually gathering more votes than any other candidate despite the suspicions of various newspaper readers. The Don got 33% vs. 24% for Quan and 21% for Kaplan: a clear victory. But wait! Did I say more votes? I meant more first place votes! In round 2, the score was 37 to 29 to 27, with Don gaining very little and the other competitors shooting upwards, at least collectively. And in Round 3 boring Jean Quan was in the lead, 45-43%. The next round put Quan over the 50% threshold and straight into Oakland history as the first female mayor.
Perata later tried to overturn IRV voting, saying he didn’t understand it.
So, yeah, it worked well in Oakland. And the plurality voting signal was highly misleading.
I do see a potential problem with having 30 people on the ballot though. Some of that could be offset with a decent press and a voting pamphlet with candidate’s statements.
ETA: The Teflon Don spent nearly $1 million on the 2010 race to Quan’s $275,000. All that money! Wasted!
ETA2: Oops. I see from wiki that Quan didn’t actually get a majority in the last round, since not all ballots were fully ranked.
Maine’s republicans are very much against this, although I thought it was just backlash against Cutler. Eliot Cutler was a liberal independent who ran for governor twice. He lost by a razor thin margin in 2010s 5-way race. He pulled away just enough left wing votes in 2014 to get Lepage reelected. Since then, he has been leading the ranked choice movement. Many people in both elections liked him, and he most likely would have won if it had been in place.
I’m not sure how good of a sample it was, but exit polling showed Cutler’s vote pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives (independents and moderates were about half, and the ends of both spectrums got about 25% each). And LePage only would have needed 20% of Cutler’s voters to get to an outright majority. With a quarter of Cutler’s vote being Republican/conservative and probably a few more not really being ideological in ways that make sense, I think there’s a good chance LePage could have pulled it off.
But didn’t Oakland used to have 2-person runoff voting (i.e. if nobody got a majority the first time, the top two would have a runoff in November)? That’s how I remember it when Elihu Harris was first elected; it was a big deal when incumbent Lionel Wilson finished third. In this case, it would appear that an actual runoff would have had the same result.
Huh. The NYT addresses this: [INDENT][INDENT][INDENT]Ms. Quan’s camp said it believed she would have won even if ranked-choice voting had not been used. The conventional wisdom was that Mr. Perata would have been able to outspend Ms. Quan in primary and run-off elections, but Ms. Quan countered that in a head-to-head race with him, she would have received votes from Ms. Kaplan’s supporters — as the ranked-choice results suggested. [/INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT] I’m inclined to agree with That Don Guy, though as a fan of IRV, that’s inconvenient for me. Looking at the numbers, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where Quan would have come in 3rd during the first round:
First round:
Don Perata 33%
Jean Quan 24%
Rebecca Kaplan 21%
Perhaps the advantage of IRV was to sort out Quan v. Kaplan.
At any rate, lots of jurisdictions have plurality voting. So this example shows that some sort of runoff procedure is a good thing. IRV has an edge in terms of the costs of running elections.
California has another procedure where the primaries choose the top 2 candidates, even if they are from the same party. That’s also superior at the state or local level IMO.