RCV is a good first step and I hope it becomes widely used. Next up – multi-member congressional districts and proportional representation. Let’s kill gerrymandering once and for all.
The city of Memphis will hold its next election using RCV and the Utah governor’s office just cleared its use by any Utah city that decides to do so by January 1.
Saw an interesting comment at the end of a story on this topic by a righty who claimed that RCV will always favor the Democrats because third party voters will always use their second choice on the Dems. Because both parties are crazy by nature. I like when Republicans step right up and declare themselves in such an obvious manner.
Experience with ranked choice is thin on the ground. So let’s talk about… the 2010 mayoral race in Oakland, California.
Don Perata aka “The Teflon Don” was one of 9 candidates. He was corrupt as the day is long, investigated but not indicted by the FBI, fond of using campaign cash for lifestyle expenditures. Real estate developers loved him and most Oakland residents possessed a pot holder with his name plastered upon it.
The opposition was split though. 8 ways. Leading candidates were Jean Quan, strong in the Asian community and centrist. Somewhat to the left was Rebecca Kaplan, a public policy graduate from Tufts University. Further still to the left was Joe Tuman, who lacks an entry at wikipedia.
The East Bay Express penned a memorable article entitled, 25 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Vote for Don Perata. Because one is not enough.
One nice aspect about ranked choice is that it allows an easy comparison to plurality voting, because that’s simply the result of the first round, before the last place finisher’s votes are reallocated to other candidates. Here were the results:
Round One
Perata: 33.72%
Quan: 24.48%
Kaplan: 21.59%
Tuman: 12%
After the dust settled though, Quan edged out out Perata 51 to 49 percent. Basically Kaplan and Quan combined beat Perata. An impressive outcome considering Perata spent a cool million dollars on the race, while Quan’s budget was $275,000. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/us/politics/12bcvoting.html
Vote tally process:
https://www.acgov.org/rov/rcv/results2010-11-02/rcvresults_2984.htm
Quan would become Oakland’s first Asian American Mayor. Kaplan is currently Oakland’s City Councilmember, elected at large.
Ugh. That sleazy fuck. I still remember the public hit piece he did on the agency I was working for when they opposed one of his real estate buddy’s pet projects( for sound infrastructural reasons ). I never thought all that much of Quan, but did let out a quiet little cheer when I heard he was defeated.
As I recall he was very nearly as butthurt about ranked choice voting as Poliquin is now.
I’m glad that the Maine election came out “right,” thanks to IRV, and it sounds like the Oakland election was a good result as well.
But runoffs, including IRV, have their problematic side as well. It’s not a coincidence that runoffs have been most extensively used, in this country, in the Southeast, and there’s a reason for that–runoff systems can make it extremely difficult or almost impossible for a minority candidate to win. In the case of the SE, “minority” candidate generally means African American, but in other contexts it can mean any kind of political, racial, or other minority–IRV essentially becomes a “tyranny of the majority.”
You can see this at work in Mississippi right now. The first round of the senate election (special) ended with Mike Espy winning 360K votes, just over 40% of the total. Cindy hyde-Smith got 368K votes, less than 1 percentage point ahead of him, and Chris McDaniel got nearly all the remaining votes (146K to be more specific).
In a simple plurality contest, Espy could easily have won. A few thousand extra voters coming out for him, a few Hyde-Smith voters staying home, a few Hyde-Smith voters opting for McDaniel instead. It didn’t happen, but with a margin as close as this one was, it certainly could have–and in most states, Espy would have been declared the winner, benefitting from McDaniel and Hyde-Smith splitting the majority of the voters.
But now we head to a runoff (which with three candidates is just about indistinguishable from instant runoff), and there’s basically no way that the 146K people who liked McDaniel are now going to turn to Espy (or would have listed Espy second on their IRV ballots); and so, unless Hyde-Smith puts her foot in her mouth another dozen times and probably not even then, Espy hasn’t got a chance.
Now, maybe you like Hyde-Smith and think she is a better candidate (though I suspect that’s not the case), or maybe you’re so focused on approval by 50%+ of the voters that you think there’s no problem with this outcome. But I think 50% approval isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, especially if there are lots of candidates and we’re looking at people’s fourth, fifth, or sixth choices. And I think it’s important to recognize that IRV is going to produce a bunch of results like this one, where minority representation can be sharply reduced or eliminated almost entirely. It’s not my only objection to IRV; but in the interests of fairness we absolutely need to look not only at cases where runoff voting produces “good” results, but also where it produces less desirable ones.
enalzi, thanks for the explanation of what Maine would do in the situation I described!
In a simple plurality contest Hyde-Smith would have been declared the winner right away. Had it been a straight plurality vote, ISTM likelier that more of the McDaniel voters would have simply stayed with the main party candidate, thinking of the risk of losing the seat.
(Then there is the opposite case, the California-style all-against-all “jungle primary” where you may end up with two candidates of the dominant party in the general election and the other party left out altogether.)
Right, that may be the case. But it also may not; think of the elections won by Paul LePage, in which the majority of voters (presumably) did not like him but could not settle on a favorite to vote for instead. And there’s a decent chance that Hyde-Smith voters might have jumped to McDaniel instead because they perceived him as the most promising candidate; the poll taken just before Election Day #1 actually had McDaniel beating out Hyde-Smith. (Obviously, it was wrong.) In that case, Espy would have won. We can’t know.
In any case, my point is not that Hyde-Smith couldn’t or wouldn’t have been the winner in a simple plurality contest, only that Espy had a legitimate chance to win the seat with a plurality vote, and has very much less of a chance in a runoff, and that’s one of the not-so-nice effects of runoff systems.
I’m of mixed mind on IRV. I really like it so far, and it’s definitely an improvement over simple first-past-the-post plurality.
But it’s got issues too - there’s still tactical voting situations (but they come up when candidates are more closely matched), you can still get weird winners. (Instant Runoff Voting: Looks Good--But Look Again .
Overall, it seems to be a solution to one specific case - two major parties, a few minor-party spoilers who won’t win anyway - that would run into problems if a third party actually became competitive.
So it’s an improvement currently, but if we’re overhauling our voting system it’s unclear that this is the best one. On the other hand, arrow’s impossibility theorem means there isn’t a best one, so I support IRV since it’s it’s better than where we are now.
The huge advantage of IRV over alternatives like proportional representation is that it’s super easy to implement in FPTP systems. It just changes how you count the votes. It doesn’t completely alter how the system works. Multi-representative districts with proportional representation is probably a superior system (depending on the details), but getting there is very difficult. Getting to IRV is very easy by comparison.
In places with IRV or other ranked-choice methods, do candidates typically campaign for each other? I mean, obviously, they’ll be telling their supporters to put them at #1, but do they say things like “and put the esteemed Mr. Smith as your second choice”?
It’s used in countries that have multi-party systems,notably the Aussie House of Representatives. India and Ireland use it for some purposes, and in Canada it’s become the general system for party leadership elections, with multi candidates.
They absolutely did in the above-mentioned Oakland election, where it worked. Similarly in the recent SF mayor election, the main two trailing “progressive” candidates( Mark Leno and Jane Kim )endorsed each other as a second choice over the front-running “moderate” candidate London Breed. In that latter case the tactic just barely failed - Leno did win more second choice votes, but Breed won just enough to stay ahead.
The point isn’t to get the “right” outcome, right being defined as “my candidate winning,” the point is to enhance the democratic process. I think RCV is an enhancement with intangible benefits, such as giving third parties a bigger voice in elections and encouraging candidates to be more likely to seek approval from a wider range of voters instead of relying on a minority of voters who make up a party’s more extremist base.
They do in Australia (example).
Until recently, Australian Senate elections took this to an extreme. You had a choice of numbering each candidate (there could be several dozen) individually or you could simply notate that you wished to use a particular party’s official ranking. The latter was much, much easier, so nearly everyone did this. It was changed because the minor parties got too good at making deals with each other to combine their votes, so in 2013 you had the Motoring Enthusiast Party get a Senate seat by scooping up votes from the Fishing and Lifestyle Party and Pirate Party and Wikileaks Party and Sex Party, in a process totally opaque to the actual voters.
I’m glad you think that getting the “right” candidate elected isn’t the goal. I’ve run across a surprising number of people who seem very enthusiastic about IRV now, specifically because the “right” candidate won in Maine owing to its use. Which is why I like to remind folks about the effects of runoff systems in the Southeast…where the results are not so favorable to those who like what happened in Maine.
It’s really hard for me to see the democratic process being enhanced by using a system that makes it much, much harder for candidates of color to win in certain states.
That may be because you’ve dreamed up a scenario that won’t happen with regularity. And even if it does happen, democracy is generally improved anytime a candidate is required to get a majority of the votes instead of a plurality.
How are the runoff systems in the southeast done? Does it involve a second trip to the polls? Because I can see where that could be burdensome to people who have to leave work or travel long distances to get to the polls while they are open. That could disenfranchise a lot of working poor.
Yes, it does involve a second trip to the polls…the MS runoff election for US Senate is this coming Tuesday, a few weeks after the original vote. You’re right, that does tend to be burdensome and it does depress turnout, and in general that is going to depress turnout more among certain groups of people than others. Yes, IRV would eliminate the need for a second trip to the polls, and that’s a plus in its favor over standard-issue runoffs.
That being said, there’s an interesting twist here. IF Espy, the Democrat, wins (and I don’t think he will, but the race is supposedly a lot tighter than expected) it will be because this was a regular runoff instead of IRV. The reason is that since the original election the Republican incumbent has gotten herself into hot water with a number of statements, statements which make her appear racist and/or stupid. These statements have gotten a lot of publicity since the original election. If there had been IRV for this race it’s a sure bet that Espy would have lost right away, since the voters favoring the third (ultraconservative) candidate would have gone almost 100% for the incumbent in the “second round.” Now, though, the statements are out there, and it’s conceivable (though as I say not likely) that they’ll change things enough to elect the Democrat.
I wish I could say that I had “dreamed up” the scenario…but I didn’t. It was dreamed up by Southern white Democrats, Southern white racist Democrats, who used it many times over the course of many years to blunt the impact of black votes. It was most common in primaries, and I’ll admit that with changing voter demographics it is not as impactful as it was. But the current MS senate race shows that its impact certainly has not disappeared, and if IRV does give rise to more powerful third parties (and if some other present trends continue), you’ll see it happening again.
For the whole sordid history of requiring a majority in the Southeast, it’s worth checking out https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3068&context=nclr. The thrust of the article is given away in the title: “The Primary Runoff: Racism’s Reprieve.” Okay, it’s a long and detailed study, and no one’s going to read it, so here are a few highlights:
–During most of the twentieth century, black candidates (along with female candidates and white male candidates friendly to black voters) frequently won pluralities in the Democratic primaries against 2, 3, 4, or more other candidates (largely white men with segregationist platforms), but then were defeated in head-to-head competition due to the 50% requirement.
–Along with at-large districts, in which city or county candidates were elected by everyone rather than being elected by ward or district, runoffs were widely considered a great way of keeping black candidates from being elected.
–A 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act (remember that act? sigh) listed a number of factors which would strongly suggest that states were working hard to dilute the votes of minorities, and one of these was the use of “majority vote requirements.”
–In Southern states, “many minorities have been defeated in runoffs against white opponents who finished second in the initial primary.” – p. 382
–“…the runoff dilutes black political power; second primaries are an essential component of the obstacles keeping blacks out of political office in the South.” – p. 386
There’s plenty more, but just typing all this makes me pissy. Check out the article. Or don’t, but please, at least be aware that requiring a 50% majority vote to elect a candidate has been used many, many times in the history of this nation to defeat minority candidates and silence those who vote for them. It’s a potential danger with any kind of runoff, instant included. --As I say, I’d be delighted to admit I’d dreamed up some outlandish, even impossible scenario. But I didn’t.
I was wondering how it was legal for Mississippi’s runoff to be this week when overseas voters haven’t had their 45 days to vote, and I found out that Mississippi sends ranked-choice ballots to overseas voters if there is a possibility of a runoff in a federal election.