How Ranked Choice Empowers Voters
Narrated by Chad Fox
Our election system, First-Preference Plurality (FPP, also known as First Past the Post), is not an effective way to select a candidate that is supported by the majority of voters. This applies to all elections that use FPP, and if you read last month's article, Plurality versus Ranked Choice Voting, I made a case as to why the current system doesn’t work well, and outlined several of the issues with FPP. And yes, some of the issues with FPP can also affect Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), but the biggest of these issues, the spoiler effect, is addressed with RCV.
As a reminder, the spoiler effect is when a group of voters that have similar politics split their votes among multiple candidates. To better illustrate this effect, let's look at the fictional nation of Cooltropolis. In Cooltropolis, the major parties — Orange and Purple — have dominated the political landscape and created two big-tent parties. During one particularly challenging cycle where the citizens didn’t seem to like any of the candidates, a candidate for a smaller third party, Yellow, arose. The Yellow party thought they had a good shot at taking down one of the bigger parties’ candidates. The Yellow candidate did surprisingly well in the polls and gained a lot of campaign donations. They even had the required numbers to get on the debate stage with Orange and Purple.
When the election arrived, the Cooltropolis citizens voted. The results came in as follows: the Orange candidate got 45% of the vote, the Purple candidate 35%, and the Yellow candidate 20%. With everything said and done, the Orange candidate won the race with less than 50% of the vote. These results have a few different (and important) things to look at: the lack of majority support for the winner and the effect of the third party presence in the election.
Looking at the results, the first thing we can see is that even though the winning candidate got 45% of the vote, the remaining 55% — the majority of the people — are not happy with their elected representative. This is important because so many people won’t feel like their needs are represented. They may feel like they cannot approach the elected official when they need to voice their concerns or opinions. FPP voting hurts confidence in government, and leads to minority rule.
The other major noteworthy issue is that the third party here actually did fairly well. Let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion, that the Yellow party actually had more in common with the Purple party. We can see how this situation now shows FPP at its worst. The presence of the Yellow candidate has ‘spoiled’ 20% of the vote which otherwise might have allowed the Purple party to win the election. The better the third party does, the more it hurts the party it’s more closely aligned with. This is where RCV shines to make our elections less about strategically voting for the person you hate the least, and instead gives us the freedom to vote for someone we actually like.
Now, let’s look at the same election in Cooltropolis; but instead of FPP voting, this time we’ll apply the RCV system. Because voters rank their preferred candidates from their first choice down, we know what would have happened if Yellow was not in the race. This is why sometimes RCV gets referred to as instant runoff voting. If election results come in with no candidate receiving 51% of the vote, the candidate with the least votes is removed from the ballot. The votes are tallied again, this time with the second choice candidate automatically considered on each ballot whose first choice was removed. This pattern is repeated — without requiring a runoff election — until a candidate receives a majority of the vote (51% or more). How does this affect our Cooltropolis election?
As stated above, our election’s first choice candidates are Orange 45%, Purple 35%, and Yellow 20%. We see no one party’s candidate has 51% of the vote, so what do we do? Just like with FPP, in an RCV system, the third party candidate is removed (automatically, without a new election). Sorry, Yellow Party… you didn’t really have a chance. But the ballot processing doesn’t stop there.
Next, we look at the second choice votes from Yellow supporters. In this example, we said Yellow had more in common with Purple. Let’s imagine that when we look at Yellow supporters’ second choice votes, 16% of them chose Purple as their second choice ,and 4% chose Orange. So, when we recount the vote after removing Yellow, we see that the results are Orange with 49% and Purple with 51%. Purple is the winner, and has the support of the majority of the electorate.
No election system is perfect, but with this example, you can see that under our current system, Orange would have won the election with only 45% support of the voters, leaving the majority, 55% of the voters, wanting someone different. With RCV, on the other hand, 51% of the electorate support the winner, even if some of those voters had to take their second choice. The goal here is to give more voters more voice. This was a pretty simplistic example, but in the real world, we have elections where the winner takes office with less than 40% of the country’s support.
The biggest benefit of an RCV system is that it allows you to support a third party candidate without fear of throwing your vote away. This will give more choice to voters when selecting the people who will represent them. Consider the real-life example of the 2000 presidential election. In Florida, George W. Bush won over Al Gore by a margin of only 537 votes. Ralph Nader, a third party candidate, garnered 97,421 votes in the state. It is widely believed that Nader’s candidacy drew enough support away from Gore to affect the outcome of the election. Even Nader’s campaign staff saw that Nader’s run would become a problem, and they wrote him an open letter asking him to resign his candidacy.
So, it appears that Nader was in the role of the spoiler, and effectively gave the election to Bush. Had they applied RCV, we would have been able to see what would've happened if there was a runoff between Bush and Gore, effectively telling us what the majority of the voters actually preferred. It is true that some states do conduct runoffs to help more votes count, and yes, this does increase voter agency, but it isn’t ideal to hold additional elections.
A great example is the special election in Georgia for a US Senate seat in 2020. Many candidates from both parties were included because there was no primary election (as is standard for a special election under Georgia law). Due to the large candidate pool, Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock received 32.9% of the vote and Republican candidate Kelly Loeffler received 25.9%. A runoff election had to be scheduled since neither of the top candidates received a majority of the vote.
While a runoff election does make sure the voting majority is honored, a second race is costly to the state as well as to the campaigns of the candidates. Additionally, a runoff election may have a lesser turnout because people who voted in the general election may not be able to attend again (absentee ballots for voting by mail must be made in advance and by special arrangement in Georgia). With RCV, a runoff election isn’t needed because we know how people would vote if their preferred candidate were not in the race.
RCV is a clear improvement on FPP because it allows us to support third party candidates without fear of causing our least-liked alternative to win. It eliminates the need for strategic voting. It also allows us to eliminate the need for runoffs in areas where that is the standard. RCV gives each of us a voice.
I have spoken a lot about the spoiler effect and how it’s a major issue. Next time, I plan to examine how it is weaponized by political parties today.
Sources
fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2020.pdf
politicaldictionary.com/words/big-tent
wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_2000_presidential_campaign
web.archive.org/web/20010415013029/http://www.nadersraidersforgore.com/printversion.htm
fairvote.org/report/more-votes-make-a-difference
Bryan Verhei graduated with a degree in Political Science from Eastern Washington University and is currently a small business owner in real estate.