Main Set to be the First State to use Ranked Voting Statewide for 2016 Elections
In a recent article in the Portland Press Herald, author Steve Mistler reports on the recent certification by Maine’s Secretary of State. Maine legislation will now how the opportunity to decide whether to use the ranked voting system in upcoming elections. The incentive behind a ranked system is that in the event of an election with more than two contenders, it’s possible that the third party candidate can sway the votes, such that the winner need not receive a majority to win. In this situation, a run-off election is held, where a re-vote takes place, limiting the alternatives to the top two contenders (removing the irrelevant alternative). In this scenario, one must physically go to the polling station to re-vote, and likely the turnout is smaller, and possible skewed to one candidate or another. Another issue is that this drags on the election process, postponing the time before a winner is picked.
Ranked voting fixes these issues by having the voters initially rank the candidates in order of most to least preferred. This takes relatively little time at the poll, but saves countless hours of potential re-votes. The mechanism behind it is simple. The most-preferred candidate for each ballot is given one vote. If the highest-voted candidate has a majority of votes, then winner is decided and the election is concluded. However, in the event that there is no majority, instead of having everyone come in for a re-vote, they merely have to look at the ballots which voted for the lowest ranked candidate and give their vote to each ballots second-choice. This process continues, eliminating the lowest ranked candidates until a majority is reached.
This ranked system may not be perfect, but it solves many potential issues. This ranked system is a hybrid voting system, in which it first acts as a plurality system, giving points only to the “winners” on each ballot, and then if necessary, uses Condorcet pairing to run a Majority rule vote in the event of a run-off election. This process is knows as an “instant run-off”, and speeds up the democratic process significantly. But this system does come with it’s flaws: imagine an example with 4 candidates, A,B,C,D, and 100 voters. Imagine 31 people rank A first, 29 people rank B first, 21 rank C first, and 19 rank D first. No majority is reached, so by the rules above, D is eliminated. If all 19 candidates who voted for D had C as their second choice, you now have C in the lead, with 40 votes. This is still no majority though, so now you eliminate B (the lowest, with only 29 votes). Again, if they may have all had D as their second, and C as their third. In this situation, C now has 69 votes, a clear majority, and thus C ends up winning the election over A. This seems inherently flawed, as the original plurality would suggest A wins, and that C would come in third. If you look at the break-up of voters that ranked C, of the 69, only 21 of them ranked C first, 19 ranked C second, and 29 ranked C third. It is an unintuitive scenario, where you end up with the majority of votes coming from those who would have preferred half of other alternatives over C, yet their contribution enabled C to win more than those who truly wanted C to win.
Luckily for us, the odds of something like that happening are unlikely, and though possible, I believe this system could speed up the democratic voting process, without sacrificing much voting preference. Some could argue that they would vote differently, if they know it can only be between a smaller number of candidates.
Ultimately, Maine is likely to leave the decision of adopting ranked voting up to the voters themselves: and luckily for the voters, this vote will only have two alternatives.