Stuff You Should Know - How Ranked Choice Voting Works

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

In the US, winner-take-all voting has created A LOT of political polarization. But what if rather than voting for one candidate, you could rank all of them so if your first choice doesn’t win, your vote goes to your second choice? So long, polarization! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. G'day, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry. The trio is reunited, like peaches and herb and cream. Peaches and herb and cream. Yeah, didn't peaches and herbs sing reunited and it feels so good? Yeah, but I don't know how your Clapton figures in. Well, there's three of us here. Oh, gotcha.

And Clapton wasn't all cream. I mean, Ginger Baker was a force to be reckoned with too. Good point, he still is. Is he still alive? Unless he died recently, I saw a great documentary about him. Yeah, I haven't actually watched it. Is it good? Yeah, he's.

It looks like it is. He's quite a dude. Yeah. I'm excited already to watch it. Yeah, you should check it out. Okay, I will. Oh, have you seen Hereditary? Oh yeah, I saw that in the theater.

That's pretty cool, huh? I liked it. I did too. I like just about anything A24 puts out. Yeah? Yeah. Shout out to A24. Yeah.

So speaking of A24 and horror movies, Chuck, we were down in Australia recently, we just got back. Yeah, I'm sick. I know, I am not. I can't believe it, but I'm not. Yeah, I got sick in, where was it? Sydney? Oh yeah, you were starting to kind of feel

under the weather, huh? It just got full blown. You seemed okay on the flight back though. Those were the beginnings. I think my body was in combat mode. And then when I got back here, it just, it lowered its defenses. It said, I'm home.

And I got some weird Australian, Australian rhino virus. Man, walking around the airport, it was like, you just sneezed on me, what is that? What was that? Yeah, and we should point out to people that we took 10 plane flights in 11 days. Yes, we did.

So that's a pretty good way to get sick. Yeah, and let's see. There, it was Atlanta to LA, five hours. LA to Sydney, 14 hours. Sydney to Perth, another four or five hours. Yeah. This was all in like one stretch. There was like two hour layovers

in between those three flights. And that's it. Yeah, it was about a 33 hour experience. Getting there. Yeah. And about the same on the way home. Yeah, it was. And it was totally worth it too.

I would agree, although when we come back, we're gonna route things a bit differently. Yeah, we are. Like when we landed in Sydney, I remember my first thought was, why can't we just start here? Yeah. But there's no magic route,

but there's probably a better one. Well, we did the black magic route if there is such a thing. Yeah, but boy, it was a grind, but we had a great time. Had a couple of days off in between, which was, I don't know if I would have made it had it not been for those days.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think it would have been too grueling to do like five cities in five days. Yeah. Yeah. Those were long flights. Yeah, they were cool down days too. You spent most of the time in Melbourne.

Actually south of Melbourne, I went to the Mornington Peninsula. Yeah, so you and me and I were down there too. That's where we saw the penguins march in from the ocean. And it is gorgeous down there. That's like their wine country, right? It's one of them. There's another wine country,

the Yarra Valley north of Melbourne, but this is the one by the ocean. Yeah. So wine country slash the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen and you pretty much get happy Chuck. Yeah, that's cool, man. And we spent another day in Sydney too, which is a pretty cool town.

Just walking around the opera house alone is worth it, but there's a lot of cool stuff to do there too. Yeah, I went zip lining. I went to the beach, went to drink a lot of wine, went to a lot of wineries. And it was that time of the year in midweek, it was just sort of shut down. So, you know, my buddy Scotty came over,

as you know, I'm telling everyone else, but my buddy Scotty came over and met me in Melbourne. So we felt like we kept joking that we had rented the Mornington Peninsula. Nice. Because there were never more than two people anywhere we went. That's really, and I'll bet the wine tastings,

they had a heavy hand. Yeah, they basically was just like, let's go sit on the porch fellas. Nice. They brought the bottle out and we just sat around and drank with the loveliest people on the face of the earth. Yeah, they are some really lovely people.

And not just in Australia, we did New Zealand too, which I already knew. You mean I'd been to New Zealand before. So I already had a pretty good idea of just how awesome New Zealanders are, two weas as they call themselves sometimes. But I mean, you got to experience it first hand too. Yeah, I mean, everyone is just so nice and accommodating.

Like the whole no worries thing is, is not just something they throw around like you feel it. It's for real. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool man, to just experience it is a very cool trip. Yeah, and even flying 10 times in 11 days, their airports and the TSA and just the way people are,

it really made it pretty, pretty great. Like I would have, it would have been a different experience flying 10 times around the United States in 11 days. I think so. Like it would have been awful. I think so. But it was great. We had a wonderful time.

We're definitely coming back. We both loved on koalas and kangaroos. Yeah. So like it doesn't get any better than that. Oh man. So yeah, you guys will see us again sometime in the near future, we'll do another tour for sure. And I'm now getting up at 6 a.m. tomorrow to watch

another Aussie rules football final match. Oh yeah, you got into that like for real, huh? Big time. That's cool man. It's great. Why not add another sport to the pile? Well, I've lost a bunch of sports. Oh yeah.

I'm kind of down to NFL and college football. No more NBA, huh? Very little. Let me see. It's tough with the Hawks. And I'll watch a little bit of the finals maybe, but then baseball, you know, I follow the Braves a little bit, but since they moved to the suburbs,

I'm not as pumped. It is a little different, isn't it? Yeah. It's just not as cool. I'm with you. Okay, we'll shoot. Might as well just add another one, Australian rules football.

Yeah. Well, cool man. Well, thank you for having us, Australia and New Zealand. We'll see you guys again soon, right? Yes, and what a great segue because Australia happens to be one of the countries in the world, as far as I know,

the only country in the world that utilizes ranked choice voting. No, there's two others, but yeah, as far as I know, they're just the three and Australia's used it the longest. What are the other two? The other two are Malta and Ireland. Yeah, I mean big countries.

Oh, okay. No disrespect to Ireland. Australia is the only country that's also a continent that uses ranked choice voting. Correct. So, and yeah, like I said, they've been using it. From what I saw at least a century, I couldn't find exactly when they started using it,

but I believe it's tied to Robert's rules of order, which is a book of rules for order that you can use if you're voting on stuff or you have some sort of parliament or whatever you're trying to do. It's the preferred way of voting, this ranked choice voting, right? Oh, they've been doing it for that long?

Yeah, a century. Oh, I thought it would just for the past five years. No, no, that's, it's actually, it's coming around in the US again, even though it was around before about a century ago, but in Australia, it's stuck for the last 100 or so years. Interesting, I read a big article that felt like they felt a need to explain to people

how to do it five years ago, so maybe they forgot. Oh really, you're freaking me out now. Yeah. But here in America, we are not quite on board. So, no, let me give you a little intro here, Charles. You ready? Yes. Okay, so back in the 2000 election,

it was the presidential election. It was a squeaker, you might say, between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Yeah. Apparently the state of Florida, so everyone knows about the Electoral College, and if you don't go listen to our episode about the Electoral College,

but you can win in the United States the popular vote, meaning you got more people voted for you than your opponent. But if your opponent wins some very strategic states, states that have more Electoral College votes, they can actually win the presidency without winning the popular vote. It happened in 2016, it happened in the 2000 election, and every time it does happen,

everybody just gets up in arms, and in my opinion, rightfully so, because the will of the people has not been served, right? Like clearly the majority of people voted for somebody else who is not the winner, and it just really ticks everybody off in this country when that happens. And in 2000, it was so close

that the Supreme Court had to decide who was president, and it all came down to Florida. Florida had a lot of Electoral College votes, and Bush and Gore were neck and neck, although Gore ended up winning the presidency as far as popular voting went, Bush won, because in Florida, it came down to, he won 48.847% of the vote,

and Al Gore won 48.838% of the vote, okay? So 0.009% of the vote made the difference in the state of Florida, and with the Electoral College, if you win that state, you get all the Electoral votes, which pushed Bush over the edge and made him president, right? And a lot of people pointed to Ralph Nader, who, as we all know and love from the Pentos episode, is like a crusader for people, just a great guy.

But since 2000, a lot of people have hated Ralph Nader because they said that he handed the presidency to George W. Bush by acting as a spoiler, that something like 90,000 people voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, I'm sorry, almost 98,000, and since it was that close in Florida, those 98,000 votes in Florida for Nader pushed Bush into the lead.

Well, that's just totally unfair because it turns out actually like 308,000 registered Democrats actually voted for Bush. So you could say that actually the Democratic Party didn't run a very good campaign in Florida if that was the case. But forever, Ralph Nader's born the brunt of everyone's ire because of this,

and the same, we see this in election after election after election, people calling out people of similar views for voting for a third party candidate, saying that they split the vote and handed the office over to their shared enemy, right? And one way to solve this problem, the spoiler, is by fixing what we call this plurality voting system which we have, which is if you get more votes

than your opponent, even if it's not the majority of votes, you still win, it's called winner takes all elections, and that's what we have right now, and it's actually creating a lot of polarity and polarization in the United States. That was impressive. Well, thanks. Yeah, man, I mean, it's basically what you have

is at least in the United States, is a situation where if you vote for your favorite candidate, you can actually hand the election to your least favorite candidate. And that's like with the Bernie or Buster's in the last election, that's kind of what happened, the people that voted with their heart that were like, I can't vote for Hillary Clinton

or I don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, I gotta vote for Bernie. Very clearly, that does swing an election. People should vote who they want to vote for. Agreed. But there is potentially a better way. And we're talking about what Australia does, ranked choice voting, what some cities in the United States

do on small local elections. It's sort of seeing a test run all around the country in little markets to see what people think. Sometimes people are voting on whether or not they should try this style of voting. Sometimes that passes and then they actually vote on candidates. But what ranked choice voting is,

is when you fill out a, you don't just say, I want to vote for this person. You say, I want to vote for this person. And then, you know, my second choice would be this person and my third choice would be this person. Sometimes it stops there at three, sometimes it's capped. But sometimes you just rank all the candidates in order of how much you want them in office.

Right. So the whole point of ranking them is not just for the satisfaction of putting the person you like the least dead last, right? Maybe filling in the name or the little bubble next to their name with a skull and crossbones. The point is it comes after the ballots are tallied. If Chuck, everybody voted for one single person,

a majority of people voted for one single person in the first count, that person won. If they had a majority of the vote, say 50% plus one single vote, right? Yes. It's done. It's just like a normal election under that circumstance. But let's say one of the candidates didn't get

a majority of the vote. This is when rank choice voting really kicks in. And this is another reason why it's also called an instant runoff vote. Because what happens is an instant runoff election from those ballots. And I think we should take a break. Oh, okay.

And detail this. That's a cliffhanger. Yeah, right after this. Oh, the stuff we live for, Chuck and Chuck. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right.

All right, everybody. If you remember what we were talking about, which I'm at rank choice voting, you list out your candidates in order of preference, and then after you hand your ballot in, they just kind of work from the bottom up almost and start striking people out until they get to someone that has a majority.

Yep. It's really that simple. It really is. If you think too hard on it, you can overcomplicate it. It's actually pretty easy. And if what we're going to explain doesn't quite make sense, go onto the web and watch. There's a couple of minute and a half long videos

that do a really good job of explaining it using visuals. I think one's by KQED out in San Francisco and another's by Minnesota Public Radio and both Minneapolis and San Francisco use rank choice voting. So go watch those videos and you will totally get it. But again, let's say you have candidate A, B, C, and D,

and you cast your ballot and you like them in that order. Candidate A is your top choice candidate, B is your second choice candidate, C is third, and D is fourth, right? Okay, easy enough so far, right Chuck? Yes. Okay, so let's say that after all of the tallies or all the ballots are tallied,

your guy, candidate A, just didn't make the cut. He came in dead last. Your ballot doesn't get thrown away, it gets set to the side because whatever all the people who voted for candidate A chose for second, those votes get distributed to those candidates in this next round. Yeah, exactly.

And that is how you end up with a majority. So what you won't wind up is a situation like you had with the current governor of Maine where he won the election with 38% of the vote. And like there's something wrong with your voting system if only 38% of the people in a voting pool like this candidate enough and they end up winning. Yeah, I mean, that's the big problem

that everybody points to with our current plurality system is if there's three candidates, you can win with 34% of the vote, which means 66% of the people who voted didn't vote for you. They voted for somebody other than you. And the other part of the thing that I've seen from research in this Chuck is that when it's a winner takes all kind of election,

like a plurality election like we have, that seems to incentivize candidates to be more polarizing because what they're trying to do is energize their base and get their base out, but they have no incentive whatsoever to reach out across the aisle to other voters. All they're doing is getting their base charged up to get out and vote,

frequently about issues that don't really mean anything. They're just kind of like, I'm not quite sure what the term is for them, but nonsensical issues that don't really mean anything. They just tick everybody off. That kind of polarization comes from this plurality thing. And one of the ways that, or one of the reasons so many people

are pointing to ranked choice voting as a kind of a way to solve this is because it does the opposite. It incentivizes people to reach out to as many voters as possible because you wanna end up as their number two choice. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting argument. In theory, it would push politicians toward the center.

However, a lot of people don't want centrist politicians. I mean, as we've seen in recent years, people, there are a lot of people that are very hard right and very hard left that I imagine would reject this kind of voting because they don't wanna go toward the center. Although right now, independents are largely ignored.

Third party candidates are largely ignored. So they would probably embrace something like this. But again, I mean, we had a situation in Kansas where the gubernatorial primary was decided by less than 200 votes. So that meant that 52,000 votes basically didn't count. I mean, they counted in that people got to speak their mind and vote their conscience.

But those 52,000 people, if you polled them, they would probably say, well, you know what, I might like a second chance to vote then on these two jerks that was decided by less than 200 votes. Right, right. And that's where ranked choice voting comes in because if you vote your conscience, which I think it sounds like both of us agree,

you totally should. And I think even further, you should not deride people who vote their conscience. It's a pretty terrible thing to do. But if you share similar views with another candidate, they might be your second choice. You might not like them. Maybe they're the establishment candidate

and you're more like the more progressive or more far right candidate. You like that person first, but you're also saying, you know, this person might have a better shot. So I'm gonna make sure that they're my number two rather than the other person. And so what you're doing then is rather

than the vote being split, like in a winner takes all, if your person, your third party candidate doesn't win that first round, your votes are going to go to that other more like-minded person. So rather than splitting the vote, you're actually going and helping to bolster it if your candidate of choice

doesn't make it to the second round. Right, obviously you need at least three candidates for something like this to happen, which doesn't always happen. So you can't always use this kind of voting. And Maine, the state of Maine is an interesting, well, it's interesting in a lot of ways because Mainers are weird and they know that.

They're very independent and just sort of a state into themselves in a lot of ways. So what you've had here, nine of the past 11 governors have been elected with less than 50% of the vote. Nine of the past 11, which is amazing. Five of those won with less than 40%. And as I mentioned earlier,

the current Governor Paul LaPage or LaPage, he won with 38%. And as of hours ago, as of this recording, he just vetoed a bill for this kind of voting to continue on his way out the door basically. I saw that there was like, there's been a real push in Maine against this too. And there's a lot of allegations

that it's basically the status quo is worried that they're not gonna be able to get enough centrist people to vote for them. And so they're gonna start losing elections rather than these polarized winner takes all contests that they can win by energizing the base into a frenzy. So a push by politicians, I guess. Right, a push by incumbent politicians, no less.

Yeah, because the people voted for it, they had a record turnout apparently, because one of the worries is that more complicated voting in theory leads to people being less interested in voting. Like this sort of sadly American thing where you have to make voting super easy and super dumb or dumb down at least. And if it's just confusing, people won't understand it

and they won't know what to do, so they may not even vote. But at least in Maine, they had a record turnout and a lot of people think it was because they moved to rank choice voting. And I saw also a 2014 study from the University of Missouri that they looked at like 76 elections or 79 elections in 26 cities that used rank choice voting. And they found that overall,

there was like a 10% higher turnout than in elections that hadn't used rank choice voting. And that definitely flies in the face of one of the great criticisms of rank choice voting that it's way more difficult than regular voting, like you were saying, right? The thing is, it's not that much more difficult. It's really pretty easy and the average person

can figure it out. What I think it calls for more though, Chuck, is a more informed voter. You know what I mean? Like you can't just scan tron it. You can't just make a Christmas tree out of it and expect any kind of good result rather than just knowing about your one candidate

and that, yes, I like this person. They most align with my views, so I'm gonna vote for them and I don't need to know anything about the other people except I don't wanna vote for them. It means that you need to know something about all of the candidates because you gotta figure out who's second and who's third and who's fourth and who's fifth.

And to do that, you have to be an informed voter. Maybe they should in the States do it with pictures as a who's hot and who's not or who wore it best. Who wore it best, yeah, in terms of ranking just so we can understand it. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a, there has to be as far as ranked choice voting goes, there has to be a real understandable,

really robust public education campaign that goes along with it or else it's not gonna get anywhere. I don't think, but I think so far in like Maine, which I think you said already is the first state to ever use this in statewide elections in the US, right? Yeah, they hand count there too. They do, but this article, what kind of worried about that? It's like, well, how long is this gonna take

if they're hand counting? Well, if under the first count like they normally do, there isn't a clear winner, a majority winner, all those ballots gets sent to the Capitol, which I think uses software from that point on. So it's not that big of a deal as far as Maine goes. Yeah, and I read the governor of Maine's, the reason why he vetoed it,

he wrote like a op-ed or whatever made a statement. And he had a couple of reasons. One was financial because they came back and said it would cost an extra of $330,000 or something. And he said, you know, they're sticking it to you, they're sticking you, the taxpayer with more money for this election, which I don't know, I haven't done the math, I can't imagine that would amount

to very much money per person, like per voter. And he also said that it was, it was sort of voted on and run through in the middle of the night, one of those type of deals where, you know, a lot of people weren't there, it wasn't debated, it was voted on in less than five minutes at, you know, late at night and that kind of thing, that kind of sneaky politics.

So that's what, that was his contention. Although I imagine if the people of Maine voted for it to begin with, then, I mean, from everything I've read, it sounds like he was just sort of like on the way out the door, giving everybody the finger. Yeah, that's what I've read too. That's kind of my interpretation. I want to hear from people, the people of Maine though,

about this. Well, the people of Maine have already spoken on, on I think June 18th, they, using the ranked system for the first time, the first question on the ballot was, do you want to keep using ranked voting? And it was, it was passed with like a 64% vote. So clearly a majority of people in Maine, at least, say, yep, let's give this a shot.

Was that ranked choice? Was it like, yes? They used ranked choice. No, right, right. And then maybe, but only if this, and well, I guess if they don't do this, then we should do this. Right. So maybe let's take a break, talk about some history.

Let's. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right.

All right, Chuck. So rank choice, like we said, it's been around for a little while. And the US took a stab at it before. I think back in the 1930s in New York, right? Yeah, I mean, the Brits used to do it in the 1800s. And then America tried it in New York, of course. And if this weird thing hadn't happened, it may still be around today.

You never know. But in a 1937 city council election, a communist actually won a seat because of rank choice voting. And that changed everything. And I think if it hadn't been for that, it might have actually caught on. Yeah, because I think a decade later, they used the red scare to basically say, look,

you can't have rank choice voting. It gets communists in power. Are you crazy? And everyone said, oh, OK, let's get away with rank. Well, let's do away with rank choice voting. And they did. But in this case, as in all the other cases where rank choice voting has been tried out

and then left behind later on, it's been tied to some other issue. It doesn't seem like rank choice voting itself is the problem. It's the establishment who's threatened by rank choice voting tends to tie it to an unpopular political thing and then gets rid of it that way. Like in Burlington, Vermont back in, I think, the mid-2000s, they tried rank choice voting.

And this mayor that got elected was a super progressive who upset, I think, a Republican incumbent. And the progressive was doing fine. Everybody was happy with them. But then he got embroiled in a scandal where, apparently, he used public funds to keep a telecom company in business that did not make the people of Burlington, Vermont very happy.

So he became a very unpopular mayor almost overnight. Well, he had been elected through rank choice voting. So the Republicans the next time around said, look what rank choice voting did. It got this scandal-plagued mayor in office. Let's get rid of rank choice voting. And people voted against rank choice voting. And it was a very close vote.

And it was mostly Republicans who voted against it. But more of them turned out to vote against rank choice voting. So it went away. Same thing with the communists in New York. The Democrats did that. They said, look, it elected a communist to the New York City Council. Let's get away.

Let's do with rank choice voting. Same thing. So it's not like the rank choice voting. There's anything wrong with it. And there may be a lot right with it. It's just that it gets tied to political scandals pretty frequently to get rid of it. I think it's because it's a new thing.

People are like, oh, yeah, that was weird. That was weird. Let's go back to the old way, even though the old way is broken. Yeah. Oakland, California is a pretty interesting situation too. In 2010, because people could make arguments, I guess, on either side here. In 2010, for its mayoral election,

there were 10 candidates on the ballot. So you got to rank all 10. And I didn't see anything about, like, is a ballot counted if you only rank like four? Oh, that's a really good point. I wonder if that's an incomplete ballot. It is. And all that's counted, though, is your first vote.

So in the first round of voting, your ballot counts, whether you rank one person or four or three. However, if you don't fill it out and you just fill out one, it gets counted once. So you could write nine out of 10, and it only counts the first? From what I understand, yes. Interesting.

All right. So in Oakland, there were 10 candidates. There was a front-runner named Don Perrata. He got 35% of what they called the first-choice vote, which is, you know, obviously pretty low for a first-choice. Did not win. And then Jean Kwan, she finished pretty far behind. She only got 24% of the first preference.

But she ended up winning with 51% to Perrata's 48% after they rolled all those other votes up. Yes, because she had gone to the other candidates who were long shots and said, hey, let's form an alliance here. Let's try to get as many voters as possible to vote for us. And that's one of the things that Ranked Choice Voting does, Chuck, is it incentivizes you to appeal to as many voters as possible.

Rather than alienating another candidate's voters and just appealing to your own base, you want those second-choice votes, too, because they count in later rounds. And that means that you have to say, hey, I know I'm not your first choice. I might even be from a different party than the one you're planning to vote for.

But let me tell you about some of the things that we have in common that might change your opinion of me, which means that there's probably going to be less negative ads, less negative campaigns. And in some cases, I think, for the main attorney general's office, some candidates have come together to basically run ads, like joint campaign ads, saying, hey, everybody, I know you're planning to vote for me,

but maybe put this person as number two. The other person says the same thing. And in doing so, what you're doing is rather than splitting the vote, you're consolidating what would have been previously split votes into something that could actually lift one or the other to office. Yeah.

I mean, as far as appealing to the center, one of the people want that, that's got to be better than what we have now, which is people digging in so far and so hard to the left and the right that they're basically, they might as well just come out and say, screw you 50% of the country. Right.

And that's a broken system. Right. And there are a lot of people, including Bloomberg, View, Callimus, Leonid Berchitsky, speaking of communists. I'm just kidding, Leonid. I'm sure you're a fine American. He basically came out and wrote an article that said, if we had gone with this type of thing,

Donald Trump would not, not only would he not be president, he would not have even won the primary, because there were so many sort of establishment traditional conservatives that would never have voted for Donald Trump and may have even sat out the election that would have written in, like, maybe John Kasich first, then Jeb Bush second, and then who knows, third.

I can't imagine who they would have picked third. But they probably would have put Donald Trump dead last. So he would have never rolled up in the primaries even. Right. And so the reason why people would have put Trump dead last, in this case, is because he was so, he was so far away from the clump of the other guys who were a little more toward the middle.

And just by date of there being more of these guys more toward the middle, that means that there were more voters voting for those people. And so Trump would have been left out, and somebody like Jeb Bush or somebody who was a centrist would have been more likely to reach the primary. And that's the point, because more people tend to aggregate toward the center than toward the fringes,

ranked choice voting serves the center a lot more clearly than it does the fringes. And it drags the fringe candidates toward the center more and gets it does away with the polarization that creates the fringe candidates in the first place. Yeah, and I guess we should point out that center of your own party more like. I don't know, man.

I think center, the thing about the center of their own party is that the difference between the two is not as pronounced. And so like there's a lot more reaching across the aisles, which I think is why a lot of people value, centrist politics a lot more is there's a lot more compromise that comes out of it rather than gridlock. Yeah, I mean, I guess in theory center right and center left

is more toward the overall center. But when I hear things like Ted Cruz is more centrist. I mean, it depends on who you compare him to, I guess. Exactly. He's a little more central compared to Donald Trump, maybe on the Republican side, but I don't think any Democrat would identify with him. Sure, agreed.

So I think you could make a case that ranked choice voting would probably keep somebody like Ted Cruz from being president one day too, you know? Maybe so. Who knows? What I'm interested in is the money. Like one of the things that Governor LaPage or LaPage, do you know which one it is?

No, no, I don't. Or however you pronounce that in Maine. Let's go with LaPage, it sounds fancy. Yeah, so LaPage talked about the money. And that is one of the things that critics bring up is it will cost a lot of money. But I'd be curious just to see dollar signs on runoff elections and what they cost.

I saw, well, that's the other thing too. Cause this would eliminate those. It would, right now from what I saw, there's 12 states that have runoff rules. The rest of the states don't, it's all winner takes all. But the only, the states that do have runoff rules, that's only in the primaries. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so in a federal election, a ranked choice voting or a general election, it's going to cost more just because it's a little more expensive. But what I saw was that it cost Maine, there's a Boston Globe editorial by the editors of the Boston Globe that said, let's do this in Massachusetts.

Yeah, I read that. They said it was just like $110,000 more for the entire state of Maine to run this election over ones that didn't have ranked choice that used plurality voting. Yeah, that's like fractions of a penny per voter, probably. Right. I should say also since talking about

bringing it to Massachusetts, I thought of doing this episode, because remember our friend Dave, who used to work at Sweetwater, Dave Morel? Oh yeah. He is running for the, I think district five house for the New Hampshire house, district four New Hampshire house.

He's got my vote. Same here. Unfortunately, we can't vote for him. But Dave was saying one of his platform planks is bringing ranked choice voting to New Hampshire. Interesting. Yeah. And he's like, I'm happy to be your number three.

I think he wants to be your number one. Well, another criticism that this one is the one that gets me, like everything else sounds pretty good. But a lot of these cities limit, like I said earlier at the very beginning to the top three candidates. So there's something called ballot exhaustion. If all three of your candidates on your list are eliminated, then your ballot is basically just burned.

In fact, I think they burn it. They hold it up and they burn it in front of your face. Like Tony Colette and hereditary. And then laugh at you. So you would think, oh, this probably didn't happen much though, but there was a study in electoral studies in 2015 that said in four cities, between 9.6 and 21.7% of voters were eliminated

due to ballot exhaustion, which those numbers are super high. They are very high. Well, one way to get around that is to not just rank your top three, but to rank every single person. I wonder why they did that though. Maybe to make it easier, I'm not sure. But the San Francisco just ranks the top three for their mayoral races, which is kind of,

I don't know about that because they frequently have like 10 people in the race, like you were saying. So just to rank the top three, that will lead to a lot of ballot exhaustion, which is a real problem. But again, if people just rank all the candidates, their ballot will keep getting counted round after round. Because after your first two are eliminated and three

and then four, your vote for that rank keeps getting added depending on the round that you're on. It's pretty interesting stuff, man. I don't know, you think it'll catch on here? It's his peak to my interest. Same here. I think anything that does away with polarization and does away with people who share pretty similar views,

but anything that does away with that, I'm in favor of trying for sure. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about rank choice voting, go check it out, some of those videos on the web, and you're probably going to learn to like it, but whatever, make up your own mind. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

All right, this is a bit long, but it's a good one. This is from an actual recently retired New York City detective. Hi guys, love the show. I was a NYPD detective for 20 years and just retired. And I'm glad to say you guys were mostly spot on with the lineups episode. Nice. And then he gives us some really interesting tidbits here.

I can't wait. He says, double blind lineups are better, but they are a huge suck on resources. You have to transport a witness or witnesses who also need to be separated, fillers the suspect who requires two detectives to safely transport from one site to the next. And now you have to find another detective

who knows nothing about your case. So that usually means to go to an outside detective squad who themselves have their own cases for which they may need blind administrators. So you can see how this ripples outward. Photo arrays would be helpful in terms of logistics, but they are inadmissible as trial evidence in New York. They can only be used to identify a possible suspect,

but in order to bring charges, you have to conduct a live lineup. Additionally, many victims feel more confident looking at real people than at photos. Defense lawyers will claim they wanna be present for the lineup to verify its impartiality, but do not actually want to be there. And in fact, rarely are.

If they're not present, they can then accuse officers of all kinds of misdeeds in an effort to have the identification suppressed at hearing. If they are present and observe nothing untoward during the procedure, it becomes more difficult for them to later claim otherwise. Super interesting. Lawyers.

Lastly, I spent the last four years of my career in a robber unit that worked with federal prosecutors. We begged squad detectives not to show photo arrays or conduct lineups, as we know what Josh said many times. It's true. Witness testimony more often than not is terrible. We build most of our cases using co-conspirator testimony, perpetrator statements, DNA criminalistic social media

analysis, cell phone tracking, security video, license plate reader, data, et cetera, et cetera. Witnesses really just muddy the waters. They're best used to say, hey, I got robbed, and then just leave it at that. It also takes the emotional burden off them at trial. Should it ever come to that? My wife and I are big fans.

Kept us entertained on many road trips. Thanks, guys. Have a great day. And that is from former detective Jason Allison. That is an amazing email. Man, I'll bet social media is a huge tool, because I'll bet there's so many goons just running around, like, I totally just robbed this place.

Check it out. Yeah. Here's the money I stole. Speaking of huge tools. Yeah. Good one, Chuck. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like the former detective did, that's pretty awesome.

We always want to hear from experts in the field that we talked about. You can get in touch with us via social media. Just go to our website, stuffuschino.com, and it's got all of our links up there. Or you can send us an email. Just send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance

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