Mark Begich and Sean Parnell write,
Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, found that ranked-choice voting decreased turnout by 3 to 5 percentage points on average in cities that implemented it. Mr. McDaniel was blunt in his conclusion, telling the New York Times : “My research shows that when you make things more complicated, which this does, there’s going be lower turnout.”
I had just finished reading Gehl and Porter’s The Politics Industry, in which they argue that ranked-choice voting would reverse the trend toward polarization and dysfunctional politics. Begich and Parnell never confront the argument that ranked-choice voting would improve the fortunes of centrist candidates. The current system rewards tribalism. The best way to stay in office in a safe Democratic district is to go far left and the best way to say in office in a safe Republican district is to go far right.
If you are going to write a competent op-ed against ranked-choice voting, then you should argue one or more of the following:
1. Polarization is not a major problem.
2. Ranked-choice voting would not help solve the problem.
3. Ranked-choice voting would lead to other problems that are even worse than polarization.
Begich and Parnell are so demagogic and uncharitable that their piece actually moved me in the direction of supporting ranked-choice voting.
“The current system rewards tribalism. The best way to stay in office in a safe Democratic district is to go far left and the best way to say in office in a safe Republican district is to go far right. ”
It really doesn’t. That’s what it seems like it would do on the basis of voting logic alone, but there are a lot of other major factors at play such as the role of Big Donors and Party gatekeepers, the power of name-recognition and incumbency advantage, and the overall system of public-opinion-regulation which prevents certain candidates or positions from ever seeing the light of day. For Republican races, even in safe states, one almost *never* sees successful challenge to incumbents from the right. There is no equivalent to AOC booting out Joe Crowley.
The safest Republican Senate seats in the country are in Utah which have been held by Hatch, Mike Lee, and (#NeverTrump) Romney, none of which can fairly be characterized as extremely partisan tribal extremists.
In the last Senate election, the other safe seats were Mississippi won by Wicker, Wiki: “As of December 2017, Wicker ranks 14th of 98 in the Bipartisan Index compiled by the Lugar Center, which reflects a low level of partisanship”.
There is also Nebraska with (#NeverTrump) Ben Sasse and Deb Fisher, “In June 2020, following the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that “extended Civil Rights Act protections to gay, lesbian and transgender workers”, Fischer commented: ‘It’s important that we recognize that all Americans have equal rights under our Constitution. I’m fine with it.'”
These are hardly firebrand radicals.
I would say the Republican equivalent to AOC defeating Crowley was David Brat ousting Eric Cantor.
Thanks, that’s a good correction. Shame on me for forgetting that one, Brat’s ouster of Cantor really was extraordinary.
Brat lost in 2018 to Spanberger, and is now Dean of Liberty University’s Business School. Cantor also really landed on his feet, and went directly to becoming a managing director at Moelis for $2 million a year plus $1.4 million signing bonus. They both won by losing.
It doesn’t seem obvious that ranked order voting would reduce polarization overall, but rather that other parties would benefit at the expense of the Democrats and Republicans.
Right now people don’t vote for third parties because they have no chance and they’d be “throwing away” their vote on a third party candidate. But in a ranked preference system, no third party candidate vote is ever wasted. Presumably, you’d have more Greens, Libertarians, Socialists and Reactionaries and fewer Democrats and Republicans.
Ranked choice voting (RCV) allows voters to express disapproval of one or more candidates in a race with more than two candidates. Basically, one can vote against one or more candidates by leaving them unranked or ranked lowest. It makes it harder for a minority candidate with a passionate following to win against a crowded field which splits the “mainstream” vote among several candidates, e.g., Trump in 2016 primaries and Sanders (almost) in 2020. Passionate activists generally oppose RCV precisely because their best/only hope is that the mainstream vote is split among several candidates in a conventional election, allowing their minority-plurality to win.
In a general election, RCV is unlikely to help a third-party at either extreme. They may get more votes, but RCV won’t help them *win*. For example, in a 3-way race between a Green, Democrat, and Republican, assume all right-leaning voters vote R-D-G and left-leaning voters are split between G-D-R and D-G-R. Then, G can win only if there are more G-D-R than D-G-R. But, if G is more popular than D among leftist voters, then even under the current system G could already win by beating D in the Democratic primary. On the other hand, a “centrist” third party might be helped by RCV. For example, suppose centrist voters voted for a Libertarian, combining L-D-R and L-R-D votes, right-wingers voted R-L-D, and left-wingers voted D-L-R. If R-L-D > (L-D-R) + (L-R-D) > D-L-R but R-L-D < (L-D-R) + (L-R-D) + (D-L-R), then L would win under RCV but not under the current system.
So, RCV would seem to reduce polarization in the sense of helping centrist candidates in general elections and generic mainstream candidates in primaries.
I’ve been working in the Libertarian party for a long time, and I don’t think RCV is going to propel us to electoral victory. A majority of voters would have to have been closet libertarians who had a habit of voting for the lesser of two evils. I don’t think this is the case. I think it will make non-libertarian government more effective by eliminating what Kling says, radical winners who are elected by a minority plurality because moderates split the vote in the primary. I think moderates are more likely to compromise with the opposition in order to solve real problems. They will not necessarily implement libertarian solutions, but strangely, I’m not a diehard ideologue.
Another example is Alabama, where a football coach – who can be counted on to do whatever he’s told by his donors and the GOP establishment- just defeated Jeff Sessions – a genuine populist in substance, even if not in style – in the Senate primary.
Trump’s “populism” has turned out to be slightly modified packaging for the some old product the Republicans have been selling for the last 40 years (and arguably longer). Genuinely “populist” candidates have not caught on in the GOP. The Republicans who actually end up being nominated and elected are almost always faithful servants of corporate interests, who throw in adulation of Trump and a few populist bromides to satisfy the Trump cultists. The defeat of Eric Cantor has turned out to be a meaningless fluke.
Meanwhile, the Democrats move ever further to the Left, in tandem with the media. It seems that the definition of a Democratic “moderate” now is someone who doesn’t shine lasers in cops’ eyes.
Lower turnout is not necessarily a bug.
Specifically, one might posit that RCV could improve election outcomes by favoring better-informed, more intellectually sophisticated voters who can think through the choice ranking process strategically, and discouraging low-information voters who might think “this all sounds too complicated to figure out, I’m staying home.” Jason Brennan and Bryan Caplan would be interesting people to ask about this.
I was gonna say the same. Do we really want people who aren’t informed, interested, or smart enough to participate in a ranked vote election to be voting? Begich and Parnell seem to be operating from the rather absurd but inexplicably common assumption that no matter what, more people voting is better, even if the next person who decides to vote bases it on a coin flip or the candidates’ haircut, it’s still great for some reason.
Many political scientists don’t seem to understand that not voting is still a form of voting; it may reflect rough indifference between the candidates, lack of confidence in one’s own opinion, or confidence in the opinions of those who do vote (delegation, essentially). Just because fewer people choose to vote in an election doesn’t make it less democratic.
Taking this further, there is no reason to believe that more turn out leads to better representation. Particularly in first past the post style elections like the U.S. has , greater turnout is about as likely to correlate with lower representativeness as anything. When only about 30% of people vote in a good year, who those 30% are matters a great deal.
Implicit in Arnold’s post is the idea that centrist candidates are the ideal. I am old enough to remember when what is now considered far-right was the mainstream center.
The Overton window has moved way left due to the incessant efforts of the left to push their ideas to extremes. I don’t think the right-left approach with the supposed center being the ideal is a useful interpretive framework to understand what is going on. For one thing, there doesn’t appear to be any far-right representation in either the House or the Senate, but there are plenty of at least pseudo-leftists. Leftism is the ideal ideology to provide moral cover for normal corrupt interest group politics, so all politicians defer to its assumptions, including supposed conservatives.
The polarity today that is shaping up is between populist conservatism and grievance identity group social predation, with the latter being the political base of the ruling class.
There was just a ballot initiative here in New York City for ranked choice voting that passed. I found it amusing that Republicans tended to oppose the initiative, yet they are rarely ever elected here anyway. Perhaps they fear a moderate third party?
Anyway, I had long supported ranked choice (aka instant run-off) voting, but if you are concerned about reducing partisanship, then you should give Condorcet methods a look. For instance, the Kemeny-Young method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemeny%E2%80%93Young_method) will ensure that any candidate who wins pairwise against all the other candidates will be the winner (the Condorcet winner criterion). This is not satisfied for instant run-off.
What is the evidence ranked choice helps centrists? Is it mathematical proof, or just a supposition?
Or further, if the voting system has been held constant and there have long been safe districts and signaling incentives during primaries, but political polarization has increased only recently, then what is the evidence that the mechanics of the voting system is driving that recent increase?
This is one of those intellectual areas in which there is a big danger of missing the trees for the forest, just like in Macroeconomics. If you always talk about something at a high level of abstraction and generality you will tend to reify mere aggregates and rough, provisional attempts at pattern recognition as ‘phenomena’ as if they have a life of themselves, obeying their own laws of dynamics and mechanics irrespective of underlying details which are per force treated as arbitrary, and are not merely emergent phenomena inextricably tethered to the particular details of the granular specifics.
The various claims about what is ‘causing’ the polarization seem to me a lot like mere repetition of Phillips Curve assertions long after that pattern broke down entirely.
The easy way to test these claims is to compare them to a list of those matters about which we are polarized and to explain why that polarization about those disputes is a kind of manipulation into error and unnecessary and, on some fundamental level, wrong as a matter of having any justifiable basis.
At some point one had to be able to distinguish between valid and invalid subjects for debate and explain when it is or is not ok to have bifurcation in the distribution of positions for those disputes. That’s like trying to establish a coherent connection between “Micro-foundations” and Macro patterns.
If any of this rigorous work has been done, I haven’t seen it. When it turns out to be hard in the case of economics, some people hold out hope for new unexpected discoveries of subtle mathematical ties, and others say that the whole effort is fundamentally misguided due to core mistakes in the conceptual model of how things work. With political polarization, I’m in the latter camp.
If the polarization were really attributable to the mechanics of the electoral system or social media, wouldn’t we see both sides moving to extremes? Instead, the polarization takes the form of the Democrats moving further and further left, and their opposition reluctantly being dragged along some number of steps behind them, but drifting in the same direction. The Democrats, and their media and academics echo chamber, vilify the opposition’s failure to keep in step with the leftward march as “extremism” (e.g. the gay “rights” battle now being essentially over, the new “extremism” is opposing the admission of “transitioning” biologically male high school students into the girls’ locker room).
The genuinely “far right” elements that have been given a voice by the Internet have yet to turn that voice into political power or influence.
I think polarization is different from extremism. It appears evident on the right if we look at it from a perspective of tribalism.
For example, there are a large number of people on the right who refuse to wear face masks during this pandemic and (though I can’t prove this), I suspect this is largely an effect of polarization.
I agree that despite polarization, there’s been a general leftward shift overall in the country, and actual policy from the mid-1980s would be considered far right today.
That’s a fair point (that polarization and extremism are not the same thing). I am not so sure that those who complaint about “polarization” often draw that distinction. Most leftist or “center-left” observers seem to genuinely believe that their opponents are a mob of Neanderthals who want us to go back to 17th century Salem.
In any event, I believe that the polarization really derives from the nature of the Manichean “oppressor/oppressed” ideology that has been adopted by the country’s ruling institutions. Not from technical defects of the political system or the development of computer technology.
Most voters are partisans who are much more concerned with the victory for their side than on the fuzzy and shifting platforms of the unknown individuals running for office.
It would interesting to analyze the consequences of reversed-order two-step election system. Instead of primaries for party candidates in which one must sometimes make strategic compromises, and then a general election between the nominees from each party, you could have a general for parties, and then those who voted for the winning party get the exclusive right to participate in the second vote for which of that party’s candidates they want.
Alaska would retain single member districts so I am not sure what all the fuss is about. A majority is no better than a plurality in a single member, winner take all district. Losers are left out in the cold, unrepresented, polarized, and, as studies have confirmed, much less satisfied than citizens of proportional representation systems. And the policy discovery advantages of politically diverse legislatures thwarted.
In Maine, the only state with ranked choice experience at the federal election level the people seem to have expressed support for their ranked choice system in a referendum. But a repeal referendum measure sponsored by Republicans has been blocked by a Secretary of State with a history of blocking referenda.
If the court challenge succeeds, it will be interesting to see if ranked choice will survive or go the way of the proportional representation systems adopted across the USA from about 1912 to 1940. New York City actually had a proportional representation system during that period. However, the two oppressive major parties killed this brief moment of hope with communism scares and backlash against city manager forms of administration.
If ranked choice wins in Alaska, the disadvantaged party will likewise campaign against it. Unfortunately incremental reform is too weak a process to survive against the interests of intrenched elites and reformers must look to more radical measures such as constitutional reform to break out of the shackles of winner-take-all.
https://www.fairvote.org/a_brief_history_of_proportional_representation_in_the_united_states
“Alaska would retain single member districts so I am not sure what all the fuss is about. A majority is no better than a plurality in a single member, winner take all district. Losers are left out in the cold, unrepresented, polarized, and, as studies have confirmed, much less satisfied than citizens of proportional representation systems. And the policy discovery advantages of politically diverse legislatures thwarted.”
If a candidate can achieve a majority of support, then switching to instant run-off makes no difference in a single member district election. However, if a candidate can only achieve a plurality of support, then it is possible for them to lose in a ranked choice vote. So for instance, if there are three candidates, one left, one moderate, and one right and none of them have a majority and the left and right have the moderate second and the moderate has the first or second most 1st place votes, then the winner will be the moderate. Note that there are many qualifications there. Condorcet methods would give a better chance for a moderate candidate to be ranked poorly in first place votes if it does well in the second place votes.
Exactly my point.
By “Ranked Choice Voting”, they appear to mean what is also called Instant Runoff Voting, where the candidate with the least first-place votes is eliminated, and the process repeated until only one winning candidate is left. My objection to that particular method is that it sacrifices monotonicity: You can vote for your preferred candidate, and they lose — but they would have won if you’d voted for someone else. Arrow’s Theorem implies that you have to sacrifice something, but that’s a pretty big sacrifice. (Condorcet is probably a better choice.) But another way of looking at it is that voters are expressing preferences in ways limited by the voting system. If I would actually prefer a third-party centrist to either of the major party candidate, it’s odd that the voting system keeps me from expressing that preference; a ranked list of candidates is more expressive, and range voting even more expressive. This needs to be tempered by questions of how hard it is to vote, and how hard it is to aggregate votes, but first-past-the-post isn’t a particularly good system.
Approval voting is better than instant-runoff. A key advantage is that it is much simpler and transparent to voters.
Approval voting has the unfortunate property that it can be hard to decide just where the threshold between “approve” and “disapprove” lies. For example, if I’m not fond of any of the presidential candidates, do I throw away my vote by disapproving of all of them, or lower my expectations until I approve of one of them? It has the unusual properties among frequently proposed voting systems that tactical voting requires randomizing your vote, and it can elect a Condorcet loser (a candidate that would lose to any other candidate in 1-on-1 elections). I find it more tolerable when extended to range voting (those two candidates I rate 7/10, the other guy is a 10/10, etc.), but much depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your vote.
I take no position on ranked choice voting, but the op ed strikes me as a camouflaged defense of the interests of the Democratic Party. The conventional first-past-the-post election system enables the Democrats to exploit the revulsion toward the Republicans inculcated (by the media, schools, etc.) among educated whites while appeasing their party’s far left. Ranked preference voting might interfere with their ability to do this, giving an opening to Bloomberg type candidates (I mean Bloomberg as he was before he converted to wokeness).
I realize that the op ed is signed by two former politicians, one Democrat, one Republican, but (1) I am certain the signers did not actually write it but were solicited to put their names on it and (2) it is no trick for leftwing interests to find former Republican politicians willing to be used as a sock puppet (see Kasich, John).
In Australia we have ranked choice (called preferential voting). We also have compulsory voting. In some jurisdictions you can simply put ‘1’ beside your first choice and that’s it. There is also some tolerance for mistakes in filling out the ballot paper also, and mistakes don’t usually invalidate the ballot being counted.
So, it’s not like the problems with ranked choice can’t be mitigated.