Why Runoffs Are (Much) Better Than Ranked Choice Voting.

Leaders can't be bought off so easily.

There is much enthusiasm in the USA for ranked choice voting. Fortunately we have a big world in which several voting systems have been tried. Unfortunately ranked choice’s track record is poor. Runoff elections are effective.

Australia has ranked choice voting. The weakness is that the party leaders then “own” their votes and can bargain for them. They are thusly subjected to the usual problem of being subject to threats and brides with results contrary to the interests of “their” voters. This was highlighted in the Julian Assange’s 2012 campaign for a seat in the Australian senate, presumably one of those of Queensland. This had better chances than you might think. Australian citizens are required to vote under penalty of law. Disgruntled citizens are coerced into voting. This means a high percentage of protest votes. Jesse Ventura and Donald Trump won big elections lacking this major advantage. Then why not….

However the campaign self destructed. It works like this. While voters have the option of ranking their choices, only 10% of voters do this. The candidate gets to decide who gets the other 90% of “their” votes. Julian declared that these votes would go to the Guns and Shooters party. Horrified, the entire campaign staff quit. That was the end of that.

An alternative is runoff elections, practiced in states such as Indonesia. If no candidate gets a majority then a second election is held, restricted to candidates with a realistic chance of winning. These runoff elections continue with such restrictions increasing until a candidate wins a majority. The usual result is one primary election and one runoff.

If Australia had runoff elections then Assange wouldn’t have owned 90% of his votes. The crisis wouldn’t have arisen, his campaign would have continued, and who could know the final result?

Now you might quite reasonably observe that the Assange candidacy was fringe, freakish, unrepresentative of politics as usual. And so it was. [I included it as an entertaining pedagogical exercise. Learn about the system and have fun doing it.] Let’s consider the usual case. Candidate A is running against candidate B. Everybody knows that A isn’t going to win, while B might. Candidate A announces that “their” votes will be given to B. Candidate B can consider those votes “in the bag” and need not do anything further. Any vote for A is then strictly a symbolic gesture. BFD. Contrast with a runoff election in which B is going to have to do something for those protest votes. B is going to have to at least promise A voters they are going to get something in return for their votes, otherwise they very well might not show up at the polls.

I say of these two systems, don’t settle for second best. As long as you intend to make the gargantuan effort of reforming the US electoral system, make your target something that will work for you, not any politician. Don’t have your vote bought and sold.