By: Madeline Butler ’24
Rank choice voting is on the rise as a new alternative to traditional voting practices. Most voters are accustomed to picking one candidate out of a larger pool, but rank choice voting would require voters to rank all available candidates.
According to NPR, “Advocates say ranked choice voting could help take some of the toxicity out of American politics while giving voters access to a broader swath of ideas. Skeptics worry it makes voting more confusing, which could especially harm voters from marginalized communities.”
It sounds like a complicated process but ranking all of the candidates on the ballot just takes a few additional steps.
If a candidate has more than half of the first-place votes, then the election is over and that candidate wins. If not, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the candidate’s voters are moved to their second choice. This continues until one candidate gets majority support.
Advocates argue that this system of voting encourages politicians to make their message more appealing to a wider range of voters because they want as many people as possible to rank them higher than most other candidates.
Rank choice voting also allows voters to show their true preferences, not just who they settle for when faced with having to make just one choice. Generally, in a US election, there is a Democratic and Republican candidate, but whenever there is a third-party candidate that gains traction, voters worry that voting third party might swing votes for one of the larger parties’ candidates.
This style of voting could also replace costly and complicated runoff voting systems.
“In a ranked choice system, theoretically it should allow more candidates to run who represent a wider swath of viewpoints, since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don’t want to win,” according to NPR.
Alaska and Maine are currently the only states that will use ranked choice voting this year in statewide races, but other states might soon follow.
According to NPR, “Voters in Nevada will vote in 2024 on whether to approve a constitutional amendment that would bring the voting method to the state’s congressional and state elections, after clearing the first hurdle to passage in last year’s midterms. In Oregon, the legislature this year passed a law to bring the question of ranked choice voting to voters next year too. Ballot measures have also been proposed in other states.”
Close to four dozen cities, including New York City, have moved to this voting system for local races as well.
“It tends to start around one or two cities and then a lot of other cities in that region opt in,” NPR said. “The Bay Area of California is one of those where they’ve had new adoptions on the heels of success in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. Minnesota is another area. Minneapolis and Saint Paul have had it for years, and then several new Minnesota cities have opted in just over the last four years.”
These changes have also brought pushback from some states. Five states, all controlled by Republicans, have banned rank choice voting in the last two years: Tennessee, Florida, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota.
“I think that we need to be careful about trying to address problems like divisiveness in politics by simply changing the system that we use to elect candidates. Many of the issues that we are experiencing, the bitterness and the division in our politics, are symptoms of other problems. And I don’t know that we have to solve something at some sort of system level,” said Jason Snead, of the Honest Elections Projects.
Regardless of your view of rank choice voting, it is an interesting way to examine our voting system and how the way we vote affects the leadership of the United States, both locally and federally.
THE BEAR FACTS 