The latest fad in American politics didn’t originate with a telegenic activist or a trending hashtag on Twitter. “Ranked-choice voting,” as it’s called, is instead the stuff of academics and election reformers more interested in political process than political food-fights. But its advocates are no less passionate about the potential of their cause than followers of an alluring leader or cultural movement—in fact, they framed the recent adoption of their idea in one of the nation’s least-populous states as a seismic event that could change the country for the better.
Ranked-choice voting (RCV) replaces typical election formats in which voters select just one candidate. With RCV, voters rank their options: In a five-way race, for example, voters could rank candidates one through five, or fewer than five, if they chose. If a candidate finishes with a majority of number-one rankings, the election is over. If no one does, most RCV elections proceed to “instant runoff,” wherein the last-place finisher’s votes are reallocated to the remaining contenders. If a ballot for the fifth-place finisher chose Oprah as a second choice, the ballot becomes a first-place vote for Oprah. The process eliminates candidates and redistributes votes as necessary until there is a winner.
To supporters of the concept, the urgency of implementing RCV is that it will encourage civility and deter demagoguery in these hopelessly tribal times. According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken last July, 70 percent of Americans said that civility had declined since President Trump took office. RCV is intended to stamp out the kind of fiery and furious campaigning that characterized the last presidential election and promote a more thoughtful public discourse. After all, there’s nothing to be gained by alienating an opponent if that opponent’s voters could rank you second on their ballots, and their second-place votes could redound to your victory.
Ranked-choice voting’s supporters are passionate about the positive reception the format has received in the cities where it’s been tried, such as San Francisco (since 2004), Minneapolis (2009), and Oakland (2010), all at the mayoral level. Researchers have found that voters in these cities assessed campaigns more favorably than ones who live in jurisdictions without RCV. “There appears to be a systematic relationship between availability of RCV elections and perceptions of relatively more positive electoral campaigns,” a 2014 University of Iowa study concluded.
Supporters of RCV, like the advocacy organization FairVote and a bevy of notable politicians, have larger ambitions: They want to see the system used for House and Senate campaigns across the country. They will have an early opportunity to do so in Maine. In November 2016, the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that would adopt RCV beginning in June with the Republican and Democratic primaries for Congress and governor. Such was the hype that “democracy experts called the statewide referendum vote that year the second most important election in the country behind the presidential election,” according to the RCV cheerleader Committee for Ranked Choice Voting. That may be overstating matters. Maine, however, is poised to do what other states have not managed to achieve. RCV failed to advance in Illinois when then-state senator Barack Obama proposed ranked-choice legislation in 2002; in Alaska, where voters opposed a ballot measure that same year almost two-to-one; and in Vermont, where Sen. Bernie Sanders has testified before the state legislature in favor of RCV.
Maine’s 2016 referendum was not a wholehearted embrace. Lawmakers delayed the measure and the state supreme court issued an advisory opinion disapproving it, but a superior court judge said in April that RCV may be used during the June primaries. Voters will need to reapprove RCV in June in yet another ballot referendum for it to be used in November for the general midterm election. Despite this slow-rolling momentum, ranked-choice voting’s most ambitious supporters say we’re in a watershed moment for the reform.
“Our current electoral system is deeply broken and is contributing to . . . increasingly dangerous hyper-partisanship,” wrote Lee Drutman of the centrist think tank New America. “We need to start experimenting with alternatives, and fast. Ranked-choice voting would be a great start.”
Perhaps. The public’s feelings about the political process aren’t especially positive right now, and petty contests for national office don’t raise the electorate’s spirits. But is RCV the cure for partisan indulgence?
“I think that this reform is meant for nonpartisan races. It’s sort of an attempt to get rid of partisanship,” says professor Lonna Atkeson, who directs a research program on election administration and rules at the University of New Mexico. “Well, you know what? Party is the best cue in the world to tell voters how to align their interests to actual candidates. You take that away, I think you reduce the number of ideas in the election. You reduce innovation.”
The high-profile test cases for ranked-choice voting in the United States have shared two traits: The population skews heavily toward one ideology, and the viable candidates are uniformly of one party. RCV is a good fit for municipal elections in heavily Democratic cities such as those in the Bay Area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Santa Fe, for example.
Maine, by contrast, has a more balanced electorate. This year, two statewide campaigns will offer useful test cases for RCV, if it survives the ballot measure in June: Republican representative Bruce Poliquin is defending his seat in a red-leaning congressional district, and the race to succeed Republican governor Paul LePage features wide-open primaries in both parties, with more than 10 declared candidates in each.
Maine is unusual among states in that it often has more than the traditional two parties on the ballot. “We have frequently had three or four candidates getting a significant number of votes, and letting the supporters of people who have fallen by the wayside have some say in the election makes some sense,” says American government professor Sandy Maisel of Colby College. “We’re not adding third-party candidates—we’ve always had third-party candidates, for 50 years, anyway.” This is especially true of Maine’s gubernatorial races. Democrat-turned-independent Angus King won the governorship in 1994 with just 35 percent of the vote compared with Democrat Joseph Brennan’s 34 percent and Republican Susan Collins’s 23 percent. Sixteen years later, Paul LePage won with 38 percent of the vote to independent Eliot Cutler’s 36 percent; the Democrat, Libby Mitchell, received 19 percent. Both fields had four candidates who received at least 5 percent of the vote. This trait makes Maine a rare bird, but also an appealing one for advocates of ranked-choice voting.
But what about elections in which the only viable candidates are the Republican nominee and the Democratic nominee—the significant majority of campaigns for House, Senate, and gubernatorial races across the nation?
One idea is that RCV could attract new or better office-seekers simply on account of the format. “You have the freedom to vote for the candidate you like best without worrying that you will help to elect the candidate you like least,” the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting notes. In other words, RCV turns spoilers into viable options, empowering people to vote their conscience. “It’s a solution to the problem of how to uphold majority rule and give more voice to voters by presenting them with more than two options,” wrote former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the New York Times in 2016.
Some political experts, though, are skeptical that ranked-choice voting alone can influence candidate fields. “When you’re motivated to be a candidate, I don’t think you probably say, ‘Oh, this is going to be an easier election or a nicer election than the legislative contest, and so I want to go there.’ I think you say, ‘Where’s my best chance of winning? Where is there a seat open’?” Atkeson says. “That’s what all the political science literature says.”
“If the RCV format takes hold in primaries, then the general election in almost all cases will consist of just two major-party candidates,” Bowdoin College government professor Michael Franz told me in an email. “Yes, Maine has had some high profile three-way races in which RCV would make for an interesting dynamic, but not likely in ways that would reduce a lot of negativity. This is because Democrats would still attack Republicans, and vice versa, [and] voters these days usually don’t rank the two parties ahead of a more moderate independent third-party candidate. So party-on-party attacks would still rule the day.”
There are circumstances wherein ranked-choice voting appears to foster cordiality among rivals. The recent elections for mayor and city council in Santa Fe are an example. In consultation with Atkeson, FairVote conducted an exit poll measuring voters’ perceptions of the candidate field and their satisfaction using RCV. Two out of three voters observed a more positive “tone” in the mayoral race than past ones, and 80 percent said they were “very satisfied” with their voting experience. However—and it’s a big however—Santa Fe’s election was functionally nonpartisan; all five candidates for mayor were registered Democrats. Nonpartisan, local elections tend to have far fewer ideological sticking points, and they reward likability. There’s little incentive for a candidate to go negative under these circumstances.
“What is a campaign supposed to do?” Atkeson says. “A campaign is supposed to raise the issues. It is the competitiveness of that election that leads to voter education,” she notes. “So if you reduce that competition, and you make it all nice and dandy, does that actually hurt the voter? Because all they’re left with is a slate of personalities.”
This underscores what could be called the “Ben Sasse problem”: mistaking civility in politics for substance. In his maiden Senate speech in 2015, Sasse distinguished between the two concepts: “Two weeks ago, in discussion about this with one of you, I was asked: ‘So you are going to admit our institutional brokenness and call for more civility on the floor?’ No. While I am in favor of more civility, my actual call here is for more substance,” he said. “This is not a call for less fighting, but for more meaningful fighting. This is a call for bringing our A-game to the debates on the biggest issues here, with less regard for the 24-month election cycle and the 24-hour news cycle. This is a call to be for things that are big enough that you might risk your reelection.”
Sasse was speaking about the Senate’s political deficiencies, but he could have been talking about the country at large.
“The problem is that the issues that divide the parties are issues that don’t lend themselves to compromise very easily, and they are the most salient issues for voters,” Maisel says. “How do you compromise on abortion?” he asks. Ranked-choice voting cannot paper over such disagreements. But one could also argue that it shouldn’t.
