Consider This from NPR - Ranked Choice Voting May Be Coming To An Election Near You

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

Ranked choice voting has become the latest political change touted as a way to strengthen democracy. Instead of choosing one candidate, in ranked choice voting a voter picks a favorite candidate, a second favorite and so on. According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted after the midterm elections, more than 8 in 10 Americans feel there is a serious threat to Democracy in the U.S.NPR's Miles Parks reports on whether ranked choice will live up to the hype as a cure-all for the country's deep partisan divides. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is news to no one, but a lot of Americans are worried about the state of democracy here. More than eight in 10 Americans feel there's a serious threat to democracy in the U.S., according to an NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist poll that was conducted after the midterms. And that anxiety has many people open to new ways of doing things, even voting. Maine's Supreme Court clears the way for the first ever use of ranked choice voting in a presidential election. Open primaries and ranked choice voting could completely change the election landscape in Nevada. It's going to be for most people like, well, what's my ballot going to look like now? Lately, one change is rising to the top,

ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is the hot reform. And it's being driven by deep, almost existential panic about the demise of American democracy. Larry Jacobs is a political science professor at the University of Minnesota. People are looking around, what's going to respond to this? And ranked choice voting is the it reform at this moment. Instead of choosing one candidate, in ranked choice voting systems, a voter picks a favorite candidate, a second favorite, a third favorite, and so on. If it sounds complicated and kind of a weird way to choose a winner in an election, Kara McCormick, co-founder of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting,

says it's something we all do all the time. We're always saying, you know, if they don't have the mint chocolate chip ice cream, can you please get me the Rocky Road? Voters in almost 50 American cities and states have decided to switch to a ranked choice voting system. So even if you've never heard of ranked choice voting, it may be coming to a polling place near you. Consider this. Advocates say the voting system could help fix deep polarization in American politics and help uphold democracy.

Skeptics say it's a confusing and unnecessary change. But what exactly is it? We'll explain that after the break. From NPR, I'm Miles Parks. It's Sunday, December 3rd. We want to take a minute to say a huge thank you to our listeners who donate to public media. It's called public media because you, the public, support it. Everything you hear from NPR, including this podcast, really does depend on your contributions. If you're listening right now and you're not yet a supporter, right now is a great time to get actively involved in creating a more informed public.

That's our whole mission at NPR. That's why we're here. Please give today at donate.npr.org slash consider this. That's donate.npr.org slash consider this. Listener support is a powerful resource. It takes all of us doing what we can when we can to keep this free public service going. Thank you. Now here's the show.

It's Consider This from NPR. Rank choice voting isn't new. It's been in the U.S. for a while. Cambridge, Massachusetts has been doing it for decades. San Francisco started in the early 2000s, but it was happening in little pockets across the country. And it was initially seen as sort of a pipe dream for reform-minded folks like Deb Otis. She oversees research and policy at the voting advocacy group FairVote. A lot of voters are frustrated with the status quo in politics. And this method is not a huge change, but in the places that use it, it has brought positive impacts. And it tends to start around one or two cities. And then a lot of other cities in that region opt in also. I would say 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 St. Paul have had it for years. And then several new Minnesota cities have opted in just over the last four years. I asked whether there was one place that pushed it into the national conversation, and she didn't hesitate. Alaska. When they used it for the Senate and congressional and gubernatorial races in 2022, all of a sudden everyone was talking about ranked choice voting. That's because for advocates, Alaska showed the ways ranked choice voting could transform politics and move candidates from playing to the extremes to playing for a broader and more representative group of voters. Let's dive a little deeper into how it works. In a ranked choice voting system,

voters have the option of ranking all the candidates on their ballot from favorite to least favorite. If one candidate has the majority of the first place votes, in other words, more than 50%, the election is over and that candidate wins. If not, if it's 39% to 21% to 10% to 5% or whatever, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and that candidate's voters are moved to their second choice. That keeps going until someone gets majority support. Advocates argue that the system incentivizes politicians to find middle ground in their districts. In Alaska last year, Otis argues, it worked. Voters re-elected Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican senator who voted to impeach former President Trump. They also elected Mary Peltola to the House, who is considered one of the most moderate

Democrats in the House, in a race that included a couple of real hardliners who would not be considered moderate by any definition. Advocates say another benefit of ranked choice voting is it allows voters to pick their real favorite rather than settling. Take the presidential race as the easiest example. Generally, there's a Democrat and a Republican. Whenever someone runs as a third-party candidate, there's all this hand-wringing over whether they'll siphon off votes, the spoiler effect. In Alaska and in Maine, which will also use ranked choice voting next year, Otis says voters will just be able to vote for who they want to be president without trying to game the system and worrying that voting for a third party candidate would help President Biden or former President Trump inadvertently. Neighbors won't

be telling their neighbors, oh, you're wasting your vote if you vote for so-and-so. If a legitimate third party challenge happens this year, all of the other voters in all the other states are going to have a really hard time with that, trying to navigate what to do, trying to play the strategist and figure out how to make our votes most impactful without harming our own side. Alaska and Maine are the only states that use ranked choice voting for statewide races at this point. But next year, Nevada and other states could join them. And every year, more and more cities approve it for local races. But whenever you start messing with voting, there is going to be some pushback. What's interesting is that here,

the pushback hasn't really been from one political party or the other. It's mixed, and it's really regional. Like in Virginia, the Virginia Republican Party is leading the way on ranked choice voting. But then in Alaska, Republicans have come out against it. In Nevada, both parties came out against it. In other places, we've had both parties supporting it. So it is really mixed. Generally, ranked choice voting is thought to somewhat dilute the power of the two major political parties in the U.S. But conservatives have started pushing back more forcefully. Five states have now banned ranked choice voting.

All those states, Montana, South Dakota, Idaho, Florida, and Tennessee, are places completely controlled by Republicans. And conservative groups have also started taking aim at it too. Jason Sneed leads the Honest Elections Project, one of those groups. And he told me ranked choice voting makes voting more confusing, which isn't what the U.S. needs right now when many voters are already sitting out of the democratic process. 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, especially at a time like what we find ourselves in right now,

where public confidence in elections is at historic lows. I don't think anyone would argue that the current system we have that, you know, in some cases, 10, 15 percent of voters voting in primaries in non-competitive districts is, you know, a correct or the most healthy way to elect leaders in a democracy. What reform or what change to that specific problem would you suggest? Or do you not see that as a problem? You know, I don't see that as an inherent problem that we need to be tackling at this point. The reality is that both political parties are very happy to redistrict many of their lawmakers into safe seats. The Democrats do

that and the Republicans do that. And that's always been the case. I think that 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. But even experts who are more open-minded to the reform are skeptical it can bring about the sort of transformational change that some advocates promise. We heard from Larry Jacobs earlier. He's from the University of Minnesota, and he co-wrote a paper poking holes in a number of those claims. Most notably, he says, there isn't much evidence at this point

that ranked choice voting actually decreases polarization. I think we need some caution because in America, we have a tendency going back, you know, a century or more to latch on to the new kind of quick fix to what ails us in our democracy. And some of those things have not worked out well, including primary elections, which were seen as really the path to a great democracy in which everyone would participate. And instead, what we see is tends to be a fairly small number. They tend to be quite ideological and not representative of the quote-unquote people. Primaries have not delivered. And I would say the same could be said about ranked choice voting.

This doesn't appear so far to be the panacea for what ails American democracy. So what is the solution then? I don't think there's the magic bullet. I think we're going to need to go through more of a journey. I think a starting point would be to say that primary elections and ranked choice voting is not democracy. We need to be clear when we use the word democracy that we mean a system in which there is equal participation. Certainly in primaries, it's very unequal. It's a small number of ideologues. When we look at ranked choice voting, it tends to be more white, more affluent voters who take advantage of the multiple opportunities to rank candidates,

whereas voters of color and those of lower income or lower education tend not to be taking advantage. So it's kind of continuing and appearing to multiply the disparities in our current democracy. I talked about that theme with Andrea Benjamin, too. She's an expert on race and voting behavior at the University of Oklahoma. She's more optimistic about the potential of rank choice voting over time to decrease polarization. But she says any transformative change to American democracy is going to require more participation. In reality, the only accountability mechanism is that we agree to turn out and that we agree to chime in, right? And so if we choose, when we're talking about primaries, 15, 12 percent turnout, we are not keeping our end of the bargain.

Benjamin says you can change the vote tallying methods all you want, but it's still just a snapshot of the most motivated sliver of the population. Advocates argue that making the system more representative will naturally make more people want to participate, because they'll be more likely to find a candidate they agree with or are passionate about, and they'll be more convinced that their vote actually matters. The data is pretty inconclusive, and Larry Jacobs says more analysis is needed as more places embrace the method. We need to have our thinking caps on about running choice voting. It does not appear at this moment to be the solution to what ails American democracy. Could it be in the future?

Possibly. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Miles Parks.