Does Ranked Choice Voting Disenfranchise Minorities?

“McCarty concluded that minority voters exhaust their ballots at higher rates when there is not a candidate of their same ethnic group. But ballot exhaustion does not necessarily mean a voter didn’t vote their conscience. “We simply cannot assume that not using every RCV choice amounts somehow to being deprived of influence,” says Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. He characterizes the choice not to rank all candidates as “the functional equivalent of not choosing to vote in a runoff when no candidate you found acceptable made it to the final round.”
Will Mantell, FairVote’s communications director, agrees: “RCV actually makes more ballots count compared to single-choice elections or runoffs. It’s really hard to say that RCV doesn’t make more votes count in New York City, for example, when the last citywide primary runoff in 2013 had a 62 percent turnout dropoff from the primary to the runoff.””

https://reason.com/2024/01/16/does-ranked-choice-voting-disenfranchise-minorities/

How Ranked Choice Voting Would Sort the Republican Primary Field

“Trump would still be the runaway favorite. But the process of winnowing away the weaker candidates reveals something interesting about the Republican field: It’s not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who seemingly has the best chance of consolidating the anti-Trump vote. It’s former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

That’s the main takeaway from a unique poll of the primary field released Friday by FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for the adoption of ranked choice voting. The survey included about 800 Republican primary voters and operated under the principles of ranked choice voting: each participant was asked to rank the GOP field from first to last, and the candidate who finished in last place in each round of vote-counting was eliminated, with their votes reassigned elsewhere depending on the respondents’ preferences.”

“Things get really interesting after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is eliminated in round nine. The bulk of his support flows to Haley, who surges into second place with 20.3 percent of the total.”

[If you did the ranked choice process until there were only two candidates, the results were: Trump 62.3%; Haley 37.7%]

https://reason.com/2023/10/06/how-ranked-choice-voting-would-sort-the-republican-primary-field/

In Alaska, Ranked Choice Voting Worked

“ranked choice voting actually encourages voters to look beyond partisan markers and choose (or block) candidates based on their merits.
Under Alaska’s new election system, all candidates compete in a single primary contest—rather than in party-specific contests—with the top four vote-getters advancing to the general election. That meant that the general election ballot for Alaska’s congressional seat contained four names on Election Day, with Republican Nick Begich and Libertarian Chris Bye qualifying alongside Palin and Peltola.

In the general election, ranked choice voting is used to determine the winner. That means that every voter ranks their choices from one through four. As the votes are counted, there is an “instant runoff” in which votes cast for losing candidates are reallocated to reflect the ranks assigned by individual voters.

To see how this works in practice, let’s look at Chris Bye, who finished last in the first round of vote counting. He received 4,560 first-place votes. After being eliminated, those ballots were re-distributed to the other candidates. Begich was the second choice of 1,988 Bye voters, so he received those ballots for the second round. Palin was the second choice of 1,064 Bye voters, and Peltola was the second choice for 1,038 of them.

At that point, no candidate had more than 50 percent of the total, so an additional elimination was necessary. Despite getting a plurality of Bye’s votes, Begich was still in third place, so he was eliminated and his votes were reallocated to Palin and Peltola. Voters who had picked Begich as their first choice had their ballots distributed to their second-place choice (unless the second-place choice was Bye), while Bye voters who’d picked Begich second had their votes redistributed to whomever they’d picked as their third choice.

As you might expect since both were Republicans, a majority of Begich’s ballots ended up in Palin’s pile. But not all of them, and the Begich-to-Peltola pipeline was enough to push the Democratic incumbent over the 50 percent threshold.”

“she lost because not enough Alaskan voters picked her to represent them in Congress. It’s really as simple as that. Ranked choice voting rewards candidates who are viewed as being acceptable even if not ideal by the majority of voters. Palin, for the second time in a handful of months, failed that test.”

Don’t Blame Ranked Choice Voting. Sarah Palin Was a Bad Candidate.

“After the first ballot, Palin trailed Peltola 40–31, with Nick Begich III in third with 29 percent. After Begich was eliminated and his ballots were re-tallied, Peltola prevailed over Palin 51–49.
In the days after Palin’s loss, prominent conservatives and Republicans criticized the new system for contributing to her defeat. After the results were announced, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) tweeted, “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.” (Previously, he has referred to it as a “radical scheme.”) Palin herself called the system an “experiment” that’s “crazy, convoluted,” and “confusing.” In National Review, Jim Geraghty termed it “a legitimate electoral system…that doesn’t make sense.”

But it’s not ranked choice voting’s fault; Palin was simply a bad candidate.

Geraghty complained that ranked choice voting was “more complicated” than “the familiar ‘first past the post’ system,” that “the Democrats came out the big winner, even though their candidate finished fourth in the first round of voting.” This is true, though the third-place finalist, Al Gross, withdrew from the race after the June primary and encouraged his voters to support Peltola.

Cotton complained that even though “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican…a Democrat ‘won.'” This is also true, though notably they did not all vote for the same Republican. Begich and Palin collectively accounted for 59.8 percent of the first-round vote, but only about half of Begich’s voters chose Palin as their second choice; nearly 30 percent picked Peltola, while 21 percent did not choose a second or third choice.”

“Far from being some radically convoluted “scheme,” the most direct effect of ranked choice voting is to serve as an “instant runoff” by letting voters indicate which candidates they would prefer if their first or second choice didn’t win.”

“85 percent of Alaskan voters polled by Alaskans for Better Elections found the new system either “somewhat simple” or “very simple.””

Ranked choice is good, but we can do better: STAR, range, and approval voting.

There are at least dozens, probably hundreds, of proposed and discussed systems for determining who wins a single winner election. Unfortunately, the most commonly used system appears to be one of the worst. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh7L9yJgVcU

Ranked choice is good, but we can do better: STAR, range, and approval voting. Video Sources

RCV vs STAR Voting FairVote. https://www.fairvote.org/electoral_systems_rcv_vs_star_voting Independent Party of Oregon STAR Voting Primary Spotlight on the Data: STAR Voting. 9 28 2020. https://medium.com/@5starvoting/independent-party-of-oregon-star-voting-primary-spotlight-on-the-data-1ab98d6fa8f4 The Limits of Ranked-Choice Voting Aaron Hamlin. 2019 2 7. Election Science. https://electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/ Overvoting and the Equality of Voice