Debunking Ranked-Choice Voting…Sort of
http://www.fairvote.org/rcv
One common narrative during and following the 2016 presidential election was that American citizens were stuck with two major-party candidates they disliked, and ultimately had to decide either to vote for the major-party candidate they disliked less, abstain from voting altogether, or vote third party. Of course, many others – particularly partisan stalwarts – considered voting third-party to be the equivalent of throwing your vote away. (Whether this equivalency is correct, as a game theory problem, is an interesting exercise in and of itself.)
To alleviate the effects of Duverger’s law (And perhaps to subvert the two-party system altogether! Who knows?), many Americans began to seriously consider implementing ranked-choice voting systems for primary and general elections across the country. Several RCV provisions have been introduced in state legislatures and many have passed, leading to increased salience in studying the efficacy of RCV in a Western democratic republic.
One organization, FairVote, has listed out many of the “benefits” of ranked-choice voting, as well as the “problems it can help solve.” Some of these “benefits” and the “problems” that FairVote purports RCV will solve are fascinating when considered in conjunction with what we learned in class today: Often the same pathologies/paradoxes that exist in majority-rule systems also exist in positional voting.
Let’s look at a few of these:
- Discourages Negative Campaigning– FairVote cites an empirical study here that supports their claim. Under our analysis, there seems to be an interesting argument that since the Condorcet Paradox still exists in positional voting, perhaps it is rational for campaigns to mudsling to push their more powerful opponents toward the end of the ranking. Alternatively, perhaps campaigns should elevate their less-powerful opponents instead.
- Minimizes Strategic Voting- Based on what we know, this doesn’t appear to be true. There are still means of tactical voting, and tactical voting may possibly increase in frequency, because it is also possible (based on another argument from FairVote) that RCV increases voter turnout.
- Avoiding Split Votes and Counter-Majoritarian Outcomes– This essentially means that we avoid elections won by a plurality and not a majority. This one is tricky to address because the term “avoiding” just implies that counter-majoritarian outcomes occur less frequently in RCV. Moreover, the definition of “support” changes under a positional system (At what point is someone’s rank too low to indicate support for the purposes of measuring whether an option is supported by a majority?). If anyone is interested in how to prove/disprove this statement, they should give it a shot!