Understanding Ranked Choice Voting: A Simple Explanation

Are you curious about ranked-choice voting and what it could mean for our elections? In this episode, election law expert Michael Dimino breaks down the basics of this intriguing alternative to our current system. You'll learn how ranked-choice voting works, its potential benefits and drawbacks, and how it's being used in some states and countries. Whether you're a political junkie or just looking to make sense of our electoral process, this episode offers valuable insights in an approachable way. Tune in and join the conversation!

Links:

Michael Dimino Bio

Transcript

Katy Smith: [0:01] Ranked-choice voting has a lot of fans out there, especially among civics nerds. But as of this recording, it's not something the average voter has access to in South Carolina. But a bill filed in the Statehouse proposes using ranked-choice voting to determine runoffs in some elections in our state. According to FairVote.org, 51 American jurisdictions have ranked-choice voting in place for nearly all of their voters in public elections. This includes two states, three counties, and 46 cities, nearly 14 million voters in total. The states of Maine and Alaska use ranked-choice voting for all federal elections, including the presidential. What is ranked-choice voting, and why does it have so many fans, and what do its detractors say? I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County, we will learn about it from Michael Dimino, a visiting professor of law at the Joseph R. Rice School of Law at University of South Carolina. He has authored or co-authored several articles in six books, including Voting Rights and Election Law and Understanding Election Law and Voting Rights. Professor Dimino's permanent post is at the Widener University Commonwealth Law School, where he teaches and writes on a wide variety of subjects. This is a continuation of a conversation on voting from our last episode, which I suggest you give a listen as well.

Katy Smith: [1:23] Last week, we covered what's under consideration regarding party registration and closing party primaries. Another tool that some states and countries use is ranked-choice voting, and we're going to dig into that today. Tell us about ranked-choice voting. That is another term we hear a lot. How does that work? Does it ever come into play in primaries? Yeah.

Michael Dimino: [1:44] It does. Some states have adopted ranked-choice voting. A lot of political theorists suggest that it is another solution to this spoiler effect problem. The idea of ranked-choice voting is that voters, instead of just picking their favorite candidate, will rank their candidates. So if more than two candidates are running, the candidate doesn't just pick, "I want this as the best of these three options," will say "this is the one I want best, this is the one who's my second choice, and this is the one who's my third choice." That way, if my first choice is not supported by very many other people, then my vote isn't just thrown away. Instead, it's reallocated to my second choice. So let me give you a historical example. The Gore-Bush-Nader election. Bush and Gore basically tie. Nader is in third place by a gigantic margin, but he has enough votes that if his supporters had voted for either Gore or Bush, that whichever one they supported would have won the election.

Katy Smith: [3:00] We would have saved a lot of heartache and hanging chads.

Michael Dimino: [3:03] Well, yes, a lot of time, a lot of lawyer fees.

Katy Smith: [3:07] Yes.

Michael Dimino: [3:07] So as it happens, so Bush narrowly has more votes than Gore. But most of the people who voted for Nader, nominee of the Green Party far left-wing ideology, most people who voted for Nader, if they had to pick between Gore and Bush, would have picked Gore. Now, some of them, of course, wouldn't have picked anybody. It's Nader or nobody, and they would have preferred to stay home. But if they were forced to choose, and even for a lot of them, if they had the option of choosing someone as a backup to Nader, they would have said Gore. Gore, I'd prefer Nader to Gore and Gore to Bush.

Michael Dimino: [3:54] So if they were able to use ranked-choice voting, they would have said, all right, Nader, number one, Gore, number two, Bush, number three. And then we run the election and we figure out, well, Nader got 5% of the vote or something, so he's going to lose. And we'll just automatically recalculate the votes without having to have people vote again in like a runoff election a couple of weeks later. We'll just do an instant runoff because we already know who those people would have chosen if they didn't have the option of voting for Nader. So we'll just sort of imaginarily rerun the election, instant runoff by saying, all right, Nader is no longer a choice. So if you voted for Nader as your first choice, then we're going to count your vote for whoever you designate as your second choice. And most of those voters, we assume, would have chosen Gore. And so the instant runoff, the vote tally that would have mattered would be all of Bush's number one choice votes and all of the Nader No. 1 and Bush No. 2 votes against all of the Gore No. 1 votes plus the Nader No. 1, Gore No. 2 votes.

Michael Dimino: [5:20] And everybody seems to think that if that's the way that Florida ran the election in 2000, that Gore would have ended up with more votes that counted than Bush did and would have won the presidency because of it. So the advantage of that system is that it allows people to vote their conscience, to say, I don't like either of these two major party nominees. I know one of them is going to win. So rather than having me have to hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, I'm going to vote for the one that I really think should win, even if it's a third party candidate that I know is not going to win. But then I'll cast a backup vote that I want to be counted. And as opposed to the modern situation where you either vote your conscience and end up throwing your vote away, or you vote for one of the two major party nominees that you don't really support.

Katy Smith: [6:19] Interesting. I mean, it seems to me that ranked-choice voting saves a lot of time and money, for one thing, and not having to have runoffs, which we often have a runoff here in South Carolina. And it also seems like it really lets me present my preference, whatever that may be. What does the opposition say? What are the opponents to ranked-choice voting?

Michael Dimino: [6:39] Well, the alternatives. So one response to your remark that it saves time is that, well, it saves time if the alternative is running a runoff election. Say, I've got to come back to the polling place. We've got to pay for more ballots. We've got to pay for more poll workers. We've got to do this whole thing in person again. But you don't have to do that. Most states just say whoever gets the most votes in the election wins, even if it's less than a majority. Now, that's cheap, and you have a definitive resolution. It's certainly really easy to understand, but you end up with this possibility that the one who wins the election is actually opposed by most of the people who voted in the election. A major criticism of ranked-choice voting, as the debate is going on now, is that it's more complicated than just figuring out who got more votes. And even though most people are perfectly capable of understanding ranked-choice voting, it's not calculus, it still is much more complicated than "let's go vote for the one we want and whoever gets the most votes wins." And since people by and large aren't used to ranked-choice voting, any kind of change is likely to throw people.

Michael Dimino: [7:59] The poll workers, of course, are largely volunteers, not very much trained. So their ability to understand and instruct voters on this process may not be what we'd ideally like it to be. And if the voters don't follow the directions, if they don't understand what they're supposed to do, or they understand it just to say, "I'm not following that," then that messes up the system. The system works only if everybody is on the same page and does what he's expected to do. That was part of the criticism of Alaska, which adopted a variation of this ranked-choice voting a few years ago and had an election that was roundly criticized because some number of people either didn't understand what they were supposed to do or the election results came and it was unexpected. And so people voted only for one candidate anyway and just refused to play the game, to play by the rules that would have advantaged their side, maybe because they didn't want to do it, maybe because they didn't understand it, maybe for whatever other reason. So the complication plus the fact that we're just changing from a system that people know and understand and are used to to something else is bound to cause confusion and various kinds of troubles.

Michael Dimino: [9:14] And in addition to that, of course, there's the thought that ranked-choice voting will help certain kinds of ideological candidates and will hurt others. And so certain people object to the use of any kind of voting mechanism that's going that they suspect would disadvantage the kind of candidates or positions that they want, they prefer.

Katy Smith: [9:37] If you are in a state that is more progressive versus more conservative, whatever it tends to be is what is still advantaged in that situation? Or does it always advantage progressives or something like that?

Michael Dimino: [9:50] No, no, it doesn't. It doesn't do that as a matter of theory. If you just run this over and over, it doesn't have a particular ideological effect left or right. What it does, it tends to make it more likely that the one who is chosen will be preferred by a majority of the voters in the jurisdiction.

Katy Smith: [10:12] That seems like a good thing.

Michael Dimino: [10:14] Well, yeah, it's certainly people have advocated for it in that way. It makes some sense to me. You have this system that encourages the selection to be closer to the middle because the one who's going to win is going to be the one who's going to compile first choice votes and second choice votes if you have a multi-candidate race. So in a race between, say, a liberal Democrat, a moderate Democrat, and a Republican, if you just run that race in a plurality winner kind of way, maybe the Republican is going to win because the Democrats will split their votes and the Republican will end up with more.

Michael Dimino: [11:01] On the other hand, if you run a ranked-choice voting system and the ideology of the state is kind of middle of the road, well you're going to eliminate the far left Democrat first and then you're going to end up with a competitive race between the moderate Democrat and the Republican and maybe the moderate Democrat will have an edge if the moderate Democrat can appeal to the people in the middle. So in that example, the people on the ideological extremes will tend not to like ranked-choice voting because they'll say, well, in a plurality race, at least I got a shot. Maybe the other side will split its votes and I'll be able to come out on top. Whereas the people in the ideological middle say, I might not appeal very much to the people on either end as their first choice, but I can be the second choice of everybody because everybody kind of respects me as some kind of moderate who's not going to throw the whole country to heck. And so maybe I'm more likely to prevail that way. So there is this distribution, but it's not like this advantages liberals or conservatives. It tends to advantage, or at least the theory is, that it would advantage people in the middle relative to both extremes.

Katy Smith: [12:18] What is the data on what other countries do? Is there a predominant way other people approach it?

Michael Dimino: [12:24] A lot of other countries have systems of proportional representation in their legislatures that's totally different from ours, which has an advantage that's sort of similar to ranked-choice voting, but can be achieved even if you don't use ranked-choice voting as the system for expressing a party preference. What those other countries do is instead of having a system that's largely a two-party system like ours, where you know the winner of almost all elections is going to be either a Republican or a Democrat, other countries allow you to vote for the party that you prefer, rather than for an individual candidate for office. So you might vote for the parliament in a country and say...

Michael Dimino: [13:14] I really like such and such party. That party appeals to me. I don't like the dominant center-left party. I don't like the dominant center-right party. I like the party that has this view on social policy and this view on economic policy. And that doesn't match up with either of the other ones, but this is the one I want. And if that party gets 20% of the vote, not enough to win an election outright, not enough to win a majority of seats in the parliament, it still will get some seats in the parliament and so the views of that group will be represented. The knock on that kind of political structure is that it tends to instability, that you don't end up having a majority party that's in control of government, you're always forced to try to cobble together a coalition of various different interests and get, you know, maybe you end up with some policies in the government in time, but before long, the coalition falls apart, the government loses, you need new elections, and it's an unstable kind of system.

Michael Dimino: [14:23] By forcing people, the electorate, to choose either the Republicans or the Democrats, the standard way of looking at things is that the U.S. System promotes more stability at the cost of leaving everybody kind of dissatisfied because relatively few members of the American electorate say, I like everything that the Republicans stand for, or I like everything that the Democrats stand for.

Katy Smith: [14:48] Stable but unhappy. Interesting.

Michael Dimino: [14:51] And it's funny how there's always also a grass is greener kind of aspect to this. I talk about politics a lot when I teach election law and related courses, and when I teach it to Americans there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the two-party system. "Boy, we got to do better. We could come up with something better. Doesn't Europe use a variety? That'd be better for us to use." And then I taught as a Fulbright scholar in Rome a few years ago, and I taught an elections course in Rome and the Italians who have a parliamentary system that represents many, many parties. I was talking to the Italians and they say, "Boy, you Americans do it right. I'm sick of the instability in Italy. I wish we could just make choices that seem more coherent."

Katy Smith: [15:41] Oh, my gosh. I don't know if I should be discouraged or encouraged by that.

Michael Dimino: [15:46] Well, the lesson is that you're going to be looking for a mirage if you're saying, "I want to pick the best system. I want to pick the system that does the best job." There's always some trade-off. You're always picking the system that gives you some advantages, some weaknesses, and you just have to figure out, well, which combination of those, do I and does my society prefer or is willing to live with?

Katy Smith: [16:14] That's great. Well, you sure have taught me a lot about primaries and ranked-choice voting, and it'll be so helpful for us to consider as we think about the bills before our legislature, which would affect the way we vote in South Carolina. Thanks so much for joining us.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.