Posted on 09/21/2020 6:01:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
Though ranked-choice voting has been bruited about for years as a way to improve elections, I never wrote about it because the debate always seemed so abstract. It's not abstract anymore. Question 2 on the Massachusetts ballot would implement ranked-choice statewide beginning in 2022. If the initiative passes, elections in Massachusetts will change dramatically.
It won't be a change for the better.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting argue that the current system, in which the candidate getting the most votes wins the election, is unfair. In a two-candidate race, the winner always receives a majority of the votes, but when three or more candidates are on the ballot, it takes only a plurality, not an outright majority, to win. Ranked-choice advocates call that unjust. "Democracy is supposed to be majority rules," says Evan Falchuk, who ran for governor in 2014 as an independent and now chairs the Yes on 2 Committee. "We should have a system where the majority wins."
But by definition, ranked-choice voting only applies to elections in which there isn't a majority winner. On a ranked-choice ballot, voters can list candidates in order of preference, rather than vote for just the candidate they like best. If no candidate gets more than half of the first-place votes, ranked-choice rules trigger a series of automatic do-overs, repeatedly reallocating votes that went to the least popular candidate until an artificial "majority" is created for one of the remaining candidates. Question 2 thus gives some voters multiple bites of the election apple. At the same time, it effectively disenfranchises other voters — those who don't rank enough candidates for their ballot to last through multiple rounds of tabulation.
Consider the 2014 gubernatorial election in which Falchuk was a candidate.
Five candidates amassed a total of 2,156,468 votes. Republican Charlie Baker received 1,044,573 of those votes — a 48 percent plurality and about 40,000 more votes than his nearest rival, Democrat Martha Coakley. The independent candidates — Falchuk, Scott Lively, and Jeff McCormick — ran far behind the major candidates, the three of them drawing a bit less than 5 percent. Under the commonwealth's longstanding election rules, Baker was the clear winner.
But here's what would have happened if the 2014 race had been run under ranked-choice rules:
Voters would have been able to rate the candidates, marking one as their first choice, another as their second choice, etc. Once the polls closed, the votes would have been counted in rounds. After Round One, when no candidate had an absolute majority of the votes, the last-place candidate — in this case, McCormick — would have been eliminated. Then, in Round Two, anyone whose first choice had been McCormick would have their votes automatically changed to their second choice. Any McCormick voters who didn't designate a second choice would no longer have a say in the election.
Since McCormick only got about 16,000 votes, Round Two would still have left the remaining candidates below 50 percent. So the next-to-last candidate, Lively, would have been dropped from the tally. In Round Three, Lively's 19,000 voters would be deemed to have voted for their second choice, and their votes redistributed accordingly. If some of those voters had picked the eliminated McCormick as their second choice, then their third choice would be counted.
That still wouldn't have been enough to give any candidate an outright majority. So the third-place candidate, Falchuk, would be eliminated, and his votes parceled out in Round Four to the two remaining candidates. Either Baker or Coakley would finally have been declared to have won a "majority." It might have been Baker, the candidate who actually got the most initial votes. But it might well have been Coakley, if more voters listed her as their second or third choice. Meanwhile, many voters would have played no role in the final outcome at all: In electoral parlance, the ballots of those who voted only for one of the three bottom candidates would have been "exhausted" before the final round of tallying.
Is that truly a more democratic system than the one we have now?
In essence, ranked-choice voting gives repeated mulligans to voters who back a loser, while penalizing voters who support just the candidate they prefer and refuse to rank candidates they know they don't want. Jurisdictions that have adopted ranked-choice voting can end up discarding so many "exhausted" ballots, researchers have found, that the final winner often receives less than a majority of the total votes cast. That certainly undercuts the main argument made by ranked-choice advocates.
"Democracy is supposed to be majority rules," say Falchuk and Yes on 2. But is "majority rules" really accomplished by a convoluted quadrille of repeated recalculations, in which first choices are swapped for second choices, and second choices for third choices, all of it happening in a computerized black box after the polls have closed?
Backers of Question 2 call ranked-choice voting an "instant runoff" system. Why not just have runoff elections? When a multi-candidate race ends with no candidate getting a majority, let the top two finishers compete in a straightforward runoff. For anyone passionate about "majority rules," that is surely a better arrangement than the intricate ranked-choice process. All voters can participate in a runoff, after all, not just those who voted for the least popular candidates. And unlike in a ranked-choice election, the winner of a runoff can claim a true mandate from a majority of the electorate.
Switching up the rules of a contest can be entertaining when playing poker, but election procedures should be simple and readily understood. In Massachusetts, elections are won by the candidate who gets the most votes. It may not be a flawless system, but it won't be improved by Question 2.
“while penalizing voters who support just the candidate they prefer and refuse to rank candidates they know they don’t want”
Well then presumably those voters would sit out a run-off election as well.
Ranked voting is a valid method for decision making, but it would not be suited for political elections.
A better solution, if one is needed, is to have a fun off between the top two places. Liberals over think everything.
I think the 2 MA ballot questions this year are both odd and unnecessarily confusing.
Q1 — would allow me to take my car anywhere I want to get it repaired. My problem with this is: I can already do that. Why would I vote Yes? I see no reason to change current situation.
Q2 — changes the way elections are handled and how winners are determined. Uhhhhhh, that’s a hard No on that one.
In a run-off, instead of computer nanoseconds, there are weeks or a month or so for voters to re-consider and weigh the remaining options.
Democracy is fundamentally unfair, because it is a mechanism to impose the will of the majority upon the minority. Two wolves and a sheep voting for what’s for dinner. Therefore, any method of allocating votes in a democracy is also, necessarily, unfair. The question is what is the least unfair method.
A Republic seems like a good solution, putting some measures outside of the reach of the voters (e.g. eating sheep for dinner) - if you can keep it.
In 2018, the Republican Congressman from CD-2 had the most votes on election night. After rank choice went into effect, the left-wing Demorat, Golden was elected.
The biggest supporters of Rank-Choice voting in Maine were hard core leftists. Generally anything they support, I oppose.
Ranked choice voting disenfranchises voters because many cannot understand the confusing nuances of how it is supposed to work or how they are supposed to mark their ballot.
Well, it would have kept Clinton out of the White House.
Ranked Choice has got to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The Constitution allows for ONE VOTE PER PERSON. How can you have two choices???
“In a run-off, instead of computer nanoseconds, there are weeks or a month or so for voters to re-consider and weigh the remaining options.”
There are weeks and many months before an election to consider and weigh the candidates to be able to rank them all.
Do you think you would be incapable of ranking a list of candidates like the below.
Democratic
Green Party
Democratic Socialist
RINO
Conservative Republican
Constitution Party
Libertarian
Social Conservative
And you could do so knowing that if your first choice did not get enough votes then your vote would transfer to your 2nd, 3rd etc.
Leftists, Democrats, Communists absolutely HATE our Republic and the fairness of voting in the hands of the electorate. The statist powers are tyranny incarnate.
Ranked voting seems to have a “built-in” run off process. I like it.
There are issues with ANY electoral system. That’s not my opinion, it’s actually a mathematical theorem. It’s called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It basically lays out a set of criteria that we would want any voting system to satisfy. Mostly these are fairly common sense things like “A candidate that is the preference of the majority of voters should be the winner”. Additionally there is a requirement that the voting system actually is guaranteed to name a winner (unless the vote is actually a tie vote). It goes on to prove that there is no voting system that satisfies all the criteria.
For example, the traditional most votes wins system fails a criterion called the Condorcet criterion. This says that any candidate that would win a head to head election against all the other candidates should win the election. It’s easy to see that this is not satisfied. If there is a third party candidate that draws off support from either major party candidate this could happen. Suppose, for instance there’s a close race where the Republican gets 48% of the vote, the Dem gets 49% and a far right wing independent gets 3%. Obviously, the R would beat the I head to head. The R would also beat the D head to head — presumably the 3% I voters would prefer the R. However the system gives the win to the D.
It’s more esoteric, but the preference method fails the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives criterion. To see what this means a numerical example would help. Suppose the preference vote in a 5 candidate election turns out as follows: (For simplicity assume 100 voters)
Candidate A gets 46 first place votes, B gets 46, C gets 3, D gets 3 and E gets 2. Also, C voters have A as their second choice, while D and E voters list B as their second choice. If that were the vote, B would win. E is eliminated, giving B 48 votes, the D is eliminated giving B 51. Suppose though that just before Election Day E looks at the polls and realizes he has no chance and drops out. A candidate with essentially no support dropping out shouldn’t affect the winner but look what would start with happens in this example. Now B starts with 48 votes to A’s 46. However once we eliminate D and C, their second choice votes were for A, so A winds up winning with 52 votes.
Note, I didn’t intend this but this also gives an example where the voting system produces no clear winner. Instead of the numbers above, assume the first place votes are 46 for A, 48 for B and 3 each for C and D. In this case though the C voters prefer A as a second choice while D voters prefer B. That case produces no clear winner. The bottom two candidates are tied, so which one is eliminated? The choice is critical— it determines the ultimate winner, but the system gives no method for making the choice. Thus this system can fail to produce a clear winner.
I’d be fine ranking those.
It’s the hordes out there in MA that would not.
You’d still not get one vote. It’s just like a runoff election, only done at the same time as the general. Your second choice candidate is a separate vote. If the ballot said “vote for 1 candidate for dog catcher” on line one, then said “if no candidate for dog catcher wins a majority and your candidate is eliminated from contention, who would you vote for” on line 2, that would clearly be a different vote for a different ballot question. That’s effectively what ranked choice is doing.
In any case, you said this method is unconstitutional. Please quote the clause from any article or amendment that states that such a voting method is unconstitutional. I don’t think you can find one.
I believe that ONE VOTE is Constitutional. You have your ONE VOTE. If there are more people running, you should not have the option of another vote. You already had your ONE VOTE. Period. No do overs. Just another way that the Left, (Just like ballot harvesting and mail-in. LA County was ordered to purge 1.5 MILLION fraudulent or inactive registrations over a year and a half ago. They haven’t done it. That is, with the state being all mail-in,1.5 MILLION FRAUDULENT ballots just in LA County, that can be filled out and mailed in by ANYBODY), has devised to destroy the integrity of our elections.
Quote me the language in the Constitution that supports this. Election law generally is NOT part of the Constitution. Technically the Constitution only originally gave the people the right to vote for Congressmen. Senators and the President were not elected by popular vote. By amendment, Senators are now elected by popular vote; the POTUS still is not. The state legislature has the sole power to determine how presidential electors are chosen for its state. The legislatures of 48 states choose to do so by allowing the party of the state’s popular vote winner to choose that state’s electors, but there’s no constitutional provision requiring this. A state legislature could simply appoint electors (as SC did until after the Civil War), by coin flip, by whether the high temperature on Election Day is an even or odd number, or by any other method.
Besides, it would only be Congressional or Senate elections to which the constitution would apply. States are guaranteed a republican form of government by the constitution, but that only means that we have the right to vote for representatives; the method of voting is up to the states. I see nothing in the constitution that prevents this system.
It’s not more than one vote anyway, unless you think runoff elections suffer from the same issue. It’s just an instant runoff. You vote for a candidate in the election and for one that you would have voted for in the runoff if yours is eliminated. Runoffs are certainly in use in many states, so I can’t see how instant runoffs are any problem.
Tl;dr — you can believe whatever you want. Unless you can find actual language in the Constitution supporting your belief, you are mistaken.
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