In class, I was very excited to talk about Rank Choice Voting, as I have used RCV in past state elections. While we talked about why RCV came to be in Maine, I thought an interesting anecdote on its impact was when RCV was used was in the 2018 midterms for 2nd House District. After the first round of voting Poliquin held a plurality, but not a majority. As lower candidates were eliminated during the runoff, Golden won after securing the majority. This election is a good example of why the voting rules matter. Under the traditional plurality voting system, Poliquin would have been the winner. However, because RCV requires a candidate to get a true majority through runoffs, Jared Golden was declared the winner. Changes in the voting rules can totally alter the results of an election!
One key benefit of introducing RCV is that it allows voters to vote their conscious rather than strategically vote. With runoffs, people are able to vote for the candidate they prefer, as opposed to in a plurality system where people are strategic with their vote. For example the thousands of Maine voters who voted 3rd party were able to do some without fear of "throwing away their vote." As a result, there is better preference revelation. An additional benefit not discussed by Mueller, but which I think is important, is that it allows third parties to run candidates in order to influence a majority party without shifting election results. For example, in the 2018 Midterm race, the Green party could run a candidate in hopes of shifting the Democrat Party to the left without fear that votes cast for them would help Republicans.
I'm excited to see how RCV plays out in the election in November and look forward to other states adopting innovative voting systems to improve efficiency.
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I would like to build off the topic of Maine being innovative and unique in how it conducts general elections by discussing Maine and Nebraska’s current “congressional district method” versus the other 48 state’s “winner-take-all” system. It has been proposed as a more proportionally representative reform option for the Electoral College, but I argue it would be threatening to our country’s democracy if implemented on a national scale. This is due to the presence of gerrymandering, and overall could lead to a decrease in voter’s expected marginal benefit, leading to more voter’s rationally abstaining. The disproportional effects of the Electoral College system would not be addressed, and gerrymandering would become even more tempting to politicians. “Swing states” would be replaced by “swing districts.”
If Maine and Nebraska’s system was implemented across the country, many voter’s voices would be overshadowed even more so than they are by the current system. This is because politicians across the nation “pack” and “crack” the voting power of the opposing party into one district or across many districts, respectively, in order to establish an unfair advantage. For example, for a liberal voter in the now majority liberal state of NY, whom is living in a conservative district may still believe his/her MB>MC of voting since NY currently allocates its electoral votes based on the entire popular vote of the state. Whereas, under the congressional district method, the same voter may rationally abstain from voting, thinking his/her MB<MC of voting since electoral votes would then be allocated by individual districts and his/her liberal vote will have no chance of swinging his/her conservative, gerrymandered district, and the state electoral votes could now be “split.” As Johnson’s article on voting points out, people focus on the ability to swing an election as a marginal benefit to voting, and if this voter now feels his/her voice will undoubtedly overshadowed and the state could now split electoral votes between a liberal and conservative candidate in a general election, he/she will rationally abstain. Evidently, when considering alternative voting procedures/systems, one should cautiously examine how its implementation could forever change democratic outcomes and potentially cause one party or another to never win a specific state, or even general election again.
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