Ranked Choice Voting: An analysis of Marshall Zelinger's and Kyle Clark's Nexton9News infomercial, then some important things to know about it.
Next's Marshall Zelinger and Kyle Clark give us a helpful infomercial for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)
Recently, under the cover of a story about those rascally Republicans and the large primaries they're having, Kyle Clark and Marshall Zelinger took a few minutes to helpfully provide us all an infomercial on the benefits of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to watch the whole thing, but what I want to take my time to look at the arguments you'll see here in favor of RCV in the snippet linked below.
This will set up nicely the remaining posts for today where we'll talk in more detail about some of the issues of ranked choice voting that the 9News folks helpfully forgot to include.
Staritng in at the 0:45 mark, you'll see the pitch made by Amber McReynolds "expert on election administration", former Denver election director, and proponent for RCV. Transcribing what she says from the video:
"This is a good example of what I have foreseen as a problem" ... Interlude by Marshall Zelinger ...
"It [RCV] ensures that a candidate would get over 50 percent support" ... interlude by Marshall Zelinger ... "in a primary where you've got a large field, uh, people can advance to a general election with 20, 30 percent of the vote, uh, or less than 50. Which means that more than half the voters that participated didn't want that candidate.
As I wrote about earlier, it's important to look carefully at the talking points you see in anything, and especially when it comes to important matters like how we elect people.
This infomercial is no exception. First take note of how Ms. McReynolds (as well as Mr. Clark earlier) start right off by assuming that a large selection of primary candidates is automatically a problem. Ask yourself if you think that's true. Is it automatically an issue? Are there any good points to having a large primary?
Importantly, are we even at the point where we're voting in a primary?
Moving ahead into what she says, I want you also to take note of how carefully Ms. McReynolds is in her word choice: it's "...50% support" and not 50% of people wanted this candidate. It would be really easy to let your mind skip over it, but there is a HUGE distinction here.
Let's say you randomly surveyed people on their dessert choices. You find that 25% of people really like vanilla and would eat it first followed by a chocolate chip cookie. 25% of people would really prefer a cookie, but they'll take vanilla. The remaining 50% split their first and second choices among fruit (boo!), candy, and butter brickle ice cream.
It is accurate for this group to say that 50% support eating vanilla ice cream. Either by first or second choice they do. But it's not the same to say that 50% of people WANT to eat vanilla ice cream. It's a matter of what they'll tolerate if their first choice isn't there.
Yes, in large primaries someone could advance to the general election with a percentage less than 50 of votes, and it could be someone that not everyone likes. But again, ask yourself questions like I put above.
Is this new? Is this a problem? I assure you (see the following posts for more) that there are plenty of voters, even approaching 50%!, in places like Alaska that didn't like what RCV gave them. Disappointment in outcomes is a part of life. We sometimes don't get what we like and we make due.
In the following posts, I'll look at RCV in more detail.
Problems with Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
In this second post I want to take the time to do what Marshall Zelinger and Kyle Clark didn't. I want to talk in more detail about the problems RCV has.
One of the most obvious flaws that RCV has is the problem of "exhausted ballots". If you're not familiar, I put a quick little explainer in link one. There's more to it, but when you think ballot exhaustion, I want you to think about a ballot that is essentially not counted. That's right, despite the selling point RCV hammers relentlessly, that of "everyone's ballot counts", in RCV your ballot may not.
Maybe you could only stomach saying you wanted one candidate. Maybe your picks were low enough on the list that your ballot no longer matters after the second round of counting. For whatever reason, your ballot is not used in the process.
This might not seem much different than regular elections where, say, a vote for the Green Party candidate is often referred to as "throwing your vote away" in the sense that your vote doesn't do anything to influence the outcome, but it is. Your vote isn't tossed, it's worth the same as everyone else's. You made your choice and your choice didn't register in the final tally because others preferred someone else by a large margin. This is fundamentally different than the case where some votes are counted and others aren't because they happened to line up with the popular choices.
I also take issue with one of the other popular arguments advanced for RCV, namely that it will tend to moderate our political candidates. That is, instead of a primaries favoring extreme candidates and then being forced to elect that extreme candidate because he or she is the lesser of two evils, RCV will lead us to a promised land of moderates.
I wonder if the people up in Alaska would agree with that contention. In their recent RCV special election, the moderate was actually the winner by total votes cast against the other two candidates, but lost.
RCV can indeed allow for elections where you can have spoiler candidates** that don't spoil, but consider another situation (outlined in the op ed linked second below).
Candidate A is a lefty extremist. Candidate B is a right wing extremist. Candidate C is a centrist moderate. If there were lots of moderates and/or if people felt safe voting for a moderate, they'd put C first and then split their second choice among A and B according to their tastes.
But, let's be honest here. In these times, most people are going to feel safest making the choice for someone they know feels as they do, someone they don't have any question marks about their stance on issues, and they'll make the moderate their second choice.
You know where this is headed: this dynamic puts the moderate out in the first round and then elects the same kind of candidate we'd get in a regular election. It doesn't lead magically to a moderate.
I took a lengthy quote about Alaska's race, where a dynamic like this actually happened, and attached it as a screenshot. It comes from this same op ed.
It's a bit out of order, but before moving on, I want to make mention of an interesting fact from the National Review op ed linked third below (we'll come back to this op ed for the final point in this post). Quoting from a parenthetical element in the first paragraph, "i.e., the 11,000 Begich voters who listed no second choice".
That is, the moderate who lost in the Alaska election had 11,000 votes which were tossed out for a variety of reasons. Here we have to speculate since there's no way to know for sure, but I could easily see confusion, lack of stomach to vote for anyone else, and dynamics like these playing a part in these ballots.
Imagine what would have happened had they been counted.
Lastly, I want to highlight a difficulty RCV has that other elections do not: clarity and transparency of results. It was interesting to put the op ed linked second below up against the one linked third. They're separated by about a couple of months and those months must have made a difference because in the op ed linked third the author bemoans how Alaska has struggled to get out results from its special election in August, but by the end of October, when the op ed linked second was out, the data seem to have come in enough for there to be comparison.
Obviously there is a big time lag in getting FULL voting results out in RCV that regular elections don't have. It seems like Alaska has fixed some of the problems, but according to the National Review op ed, quoting with the links intact should you want to follow up, "In New York City, the formal reports still do not offer transparency into whom those who voted for Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia picked below the top slot, although groups studying the election have been able to get access to more detailed data about how many ballots made only one choice."
This is not okay. RCV is significantly more complicated in its workings than other types of elections and if some already struggle to believe the current, simpler system, what do you think the chances will be that they'll fall to their knees and thank God for RCV where getting a full accounting takes a long time (at least)?
Shoving RCV down the throats of a doubtful populace seems a recipe for disaster to me.
Is RCV a nightmare? A conspiracy? A savior on a white horse?
No, no, and no.
It's another way to do something we're already doing and as you can see above it's far from perfect (although it does have some upsides).
Wrap up in the next post.
**Think, for example of Ross Perot splitting off some Republicans.
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_exhaustion
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3711206-the-flaw-in-ranked-choice-voting-rewarding-extremists/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-of-transparency-in-ranked-choice-voting/
Last in the series on RCV, let's knock on the door and ask for Ronnie Real.
Let's consider RCV in light of the (to me) fantastic claims that it's supporters make and in the light of what humans beings acting politically actually do.
When I first started teaching college, I suddenly had classes which had electronic homework (homework the students do on the computer that automatically grades and updates) in some of my classes. What a revelation! Homework done on paper has always been a challenge: not only can it bury you as a teacher, but, more importantly, getting it back to the students in time for them to see how they did, know what corrections in their thinking are needed, and etc. is a difficulty. Particularly when you have more than one class with 20 some students per.
Online homework freed me from that. It enabled me to see how the students did, but it let THEM see how they did immediately and to practice on their weak spots. I also enjoyed how it freed my attention from endless paperwork to focus on larger trends and issues I saw with class.
And then I realized the problems it has. I won't bore you with a list, but suffice it to say that for every plus in online homework, there was a drawback. The real question is whether (for you, your style, your preferences as a teacher, your students) the online homework's flaws are outweighed by its benefits.
Thus with any voting system we employ.
Said another way, we will (repeat will) have issues no matter what we do, and I hold with Professor Aldrich from the link below when he says that (quoting):
"In summation, the problem with relying on any voting rule is that every voting rule has its own weaknesses. Even more importantly, ranked-choice voting, like any voting rule, is vulnerable to strategic manipulation by the political parties, candidates, and financial donors, as well as the voters. Plurality rule may be especially easy to manipulate, but ranked-choice voting, like all others, is so as well."
With RCV we're going to do as I did with online homework. We are going to trade one set of problems for another. I think it's also an illusion to say that somehow RCV will fix political polarization. The polarization is already there and adopting RCV will simply net us polarization with RCV. See esp. my previous post.
I will go even further. I think that RCV will be a net harm to everyday voters if we adopt it, at least in the short term.
Right now, there are paid consultants who make lots and lots of money by learning how to strategize and win elections. There are political machines with apparatus set up to aid in that effort. This is their full time job (likely an avocation too) and their raison d'etre respectively. If we switch to RCV, it will not be hard for them to figure out how to game the system. It's their job.
Now, I want you to think about how much of your day, your week, you have to devoting to figuring out the meaning and the strategy behind what a consultant or political machine would be doing. In between rushing off to work, coming home, cooking, putting kids to bed, paying bills, a water heater that's making funny noises and putting out brown tepid water, are you going to even imagine yourself on an equal footing?
Say what you will about our current system, at least we grew up with it. At least there is some, to borrow a phrase, institutional memory there. We may not be privy to all the manipulating, but we know some rough outlines.
No, RCV will not save us. It will not eliminate polarization. It will not get rid of political machines or dark money. Those are humans acting as political animals problems. They don't go away until we legislate a new human nature.
In the end, a reasonable and calm assessment shows that RCV is trading one set of problems for another and leaving those without the time or knowledge to be fully immersed in politics at a disadvantage.
https://dividedwefall.org/ranked-choice-voting-debate/?gclid=CjwKCAiA-vOsBhAAEiwAIWR0TXcjdfc3WmHVQXsdGAxMZYDWx1g-kcNtw3ZjP2OjgwSmkdUqDzEtmhoCji0QAvD_BwE