Is Ranked Choice Voting wrapping a bandage around the stab wound?
Should California go all in? Should California avoid? This shit is complicated
By Alex Gibson
Special to The Truth OC
Just a few weeks ago, the California primary elections wrapped and, during that time, debate swirled around whether the state should institute Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
The main reason offered dealt with the massive number of Democratic candidates running—in particular the wild gubernatorial race. In the current California primary system, the two candidates with the most votes (regardless of party) move on to a head-to-head election to decide the winner. With approximately 8,432,111 people running for governor, this posed a serious vote-splitting dilemma—would divisions within the Democratic field result in two Republicans advancing?
Well, a collective sigh of relief could be heard in all of San Fran’s coffee shops when Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton (Your Newport grandpa’s favorite Fox News Host) emerged. Despite this, the need for a hopefully fairer and more representative version of voting has led many to support the switch to RCV.
So, what is RCV? It’s basically the Hunger Games of voting methods. Voters get to list their favorite candidates in order (instead of just one), and then entrants get eliminated, round by round, until someone has a 50 percent majority and triumphs. This system serves a dual purpose: It helps to solve both vote splitting and the voter representation problem. Since the electorate can now rank a series of candidates, folks won’t lose sleep over having voted for the less-popular Democrat. As to representation, before if you voted for someone who did something dumb (like, eh, this) then you simply wouldn’t be represented. In fact, Becerra and Hilton both moved on with less than 30 percent of the popular vote—meaning the two options for Californians in November were the No. 1 choice of less than one in three voters. With RCV, the hope is a real majority emerges—once the stragglers are eliminated, the winner is the one with more than half the remaining ballots.
RCV has its struggles, though. The winner of RCV is whoever is last standing, and not necessarily who is the most supported candidate. It’s like in the Hunger Games: Maybe the guy with the skills to kill the last two survivors gets killed early by someone else. In that case, the winner of the Hunger Games wasn’t necessarily the best candidate, they were just able to stay alive the longest. This manifests in a concept called center-squeeze. Essentially, moderate candidates who can capture a lot of people’s later choices—but crucially not a lot of first choices—tend to get voted out in the first round. This specifically hurts centrist or moderate candidates because while they can capture a lot more overall sentiment, more first choice votes go to more radical leaning candidates on either side. Today, politics has become so polarized that this poses a serious threat to the legitimacy of RCV to produce the most representative winner. If there was a vote between that inflatable frog from the Portland protests, a moderate independent, and a January 6 “Patriot,” unfortunately, in this political climate I don’t think the independent is winning—even though they likely represent more of the general public.
Ultimately, RCV is being proposed as a fix to a problem that can’t be solved by simply changing out the voting system. Center-squeeze proves that in such a politically divided country, RCV is like wrapping a bandage around the stab wound instead of the feeble Band-Aid of plurality. It isn’t stitches. It won’t fix the problem. Will it help? It would likely be better than the current system at finding a larger representative majority. But the main problem still stands: the RCV majority is more than likely going to be party-based. Democrats only listing Democrats and Republicans only listing Republicans. Hopefully, US politics will one day be able to reach a point where the average voter can see candidates from both parties running in their common interest, and not so radicalized that they don’t agree on anything.
That’s when RCV can truly stand out against inferior voting methods like the current plurality method.
Alex Gibson is an Economics and English student at Colby College with an interest in politics and finance. Check him out on LinkedIn.
It’s amusing to see a suggestion that RCV would elect more polarized candidates, since the common criticism from the idealists of both parties is that it elects moderates and centrists. This article doesn’t suggest a better solution, and the article makes it clear that our present election system produces very polarized representatives. The test is whether RCV is better than other systems, not whether it is perfect – no system is perfect.
The suggestion that an RCV winner is the last standing and not the most supported is simply wrong. The winner is the last standing because the winner is the most supported. The basic feature of RCV is that it elects someone that most voters support by providing an instant runoff between the top vote-getters. If most people want a moderate, most people will rank the moderate first. The way that RCV would elect polarized candidates is if the majority of the voters are polarized. Thus, a conservative district or city will elect conservatives under RCV, while a liberal district or city will elect liberals. The elimination of vote-splitting keeps a conservative city from being represented by liberals and vice-versa. I would suggest that is the fair result. The suggestion that an independent would be eliminated after the first round by coming in third or lower to both the inflatable frog and the January 6 “Patriot” is simply implausible – perhaps one, but not both.
There is a difference between state and federal elections on one hand, and local elections on the other hand. Local elections are non-partisan, meaning that party affiliation is not listed on the ballot. At the state level, party affiliation is listed. In the governor race and other statewide elections, the best way to use RCV would be to eliminate the primary or send the top five candidates from the primary to the general election, and use RCV in the general election. RCV would eliminate vote-splitting between candidates from the same party. Because voters of both parties vote in the same election, it would be difficult for an extremist of either party to win an RCV election.
RCV doesn’t solve polarization by itself. The social media algorithms, campaign contributions and other factors also need to be addressed. But because RCV ensures majority winners, it is a step toward addressing polarization.
- Paul Haughey, Legal Chair and Board member of CalRCV (and UC Irvine class of 1976).
Seemed to work pretty well for NYC primaries. Much more fair than what we have now