As of the election day last Tuesday, New York City has switched to a Ranked Choice Voting system due to an overwhelming majority in the ballot. The margin by which the new system won with about 75% of the vote. This is interesting because I wonder how many voters were informed by this decision. As we have talked about in class, many people choose to be ignorant on different topics in life. As a person who did not vote, I was ignorant to any policies that were brought up in the voting booth. Moreover, the new system will have the voters rank each of their top 5 candidates. They will be joining about 20 other cities across the country as well as Maine in using this voting reform. As we have read in the textbook and experienced in class, ranked choice voting has a way better chance of choosing the correct candidate or Condorcet winner.
The opposition to this new voting system only argued that it would take more time to count up all the votes and eliminate the last place candidates. However a huge pro is that it will eliminate negative campaigning against fellow candidates, as well as making candidates catering to all voters because if one set of voters really does not like a certain candidate then they will get a lot of last ranked votes.
Ideally, the country would switch to this method because there would be plenty of elections in the past that could have had different results but since they had a loyal following they won a plurality vote. In the 2016 election, Hillary and Trump received less than 50% of the vote in 12 different states and a third party won the rest of the vote. It would have been interesting to see how the presidential election would have ended up especially after Hillary won the popular vote and lost the election due to plurality in states causing her to lose in the electoral college.
2 comments:
Jack, I was glad to see you wrote about New York City’s switch to Ranked-Choice Voting. As you state, some opposition to this voting system cites time as an issue. However, this time does not refer solely to the time or efficiency of as you say “counting up the votes and eliminating the last place candidates,” but instead to the time voters have to take to read up on candidates or in the voting booth. This may result in mistakes or overall inefficiency due to rational ignorance and voters subsequently not maximizing their true preferences in the new system. This argument, though, has been strongly pushed back against, as it has been shown that RCV increases voter turnout, makes the political system more robust as it does not pigeonhole people, and is simply “not that complicated” (https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2019/11/05/ranked-choice-voting-adopted-in-new-york-city-along-with-other-ballot-measures-1226390).
In terms of efficiency, it’s actually believed that RCV could prevent costly runoff elections that take place when no candidate has won a clear majority, potentially saving tens of millions for each election cycle. I disagree that arguments of time and efficiency are the only opposition, though, as it has also been discussed that demographics play a role (as white, well-off constituents are more likely to maximize and rank all of the candidates). As you note, though, RCV may well lead to a decrease in negative campaigning and the reason this is so significant is because this has been shown to increase the amount of people of color and women running. Therefore, there are clearly a variety of nuances to the debate in its demographic implications.
I believe the heavily cited rationale for RCV is depolarization, which you allude to when you say “making candidates cater to all voters.” It is not necessarily true that candidates would now cater to all voters, but RCV will likely result in an altogether more productive and healthy conversation between what are currently very opposed sides. To clarify, when a voter no longer has to vote for an establishment candidate due to a worry that another favorite cannot win, the two major candidates are forced to appeal to voters outside a narrow base, not just with positive campaigning but with wider-reaching policy initiative. Also, in reference to Hillary v. Trump, which is a great question, this article may be somewhat helpful (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13576798/jill-stein-third-party-donald-trump-win).
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