During the past year, I was voluble in my support of a new kind of election structure called either “ranked choice voting” or “instant runoff voting.” The idea was to eliminate the expensive and, usually, low turnout runoff election that localities use when a 50 percent plus one electoral majority is required.
The concept makes sense. When a voter fills out his or her ballot, they rank the people listed so that, in the event none of them get the required majority, the votes of the lowest vote getter would be re-tallied based on the second choice listed.
The process would continue until the top vote getter reaches 50 percent plus one.
The City of Oakland used this system in the election just conducted for mayor and city council candidates and the results were devastating to the concept. In many of the contests, a person who won majorities in none of the City’s precincts ended up winning the election. In some races, the person with the most votes in each precinct ended up losing.
Part of these results could be attributed to an “anybody-but-the-leading-candidate” scenario where not nearly a majority liked the leading candidate, but everybody else didn’t want to come near him. However, a more logical explanation of the results was, frankly, how ill-informed, bored and, frankly, lazy, some (or maybe) much of the voting constituency is.
Take one of the races for city council, where 21 candidates were running for a single office. For this system to work perfectly, every voter would have had to rank all 21 candidates so that when the low vote getters were removed, a proper reallocation would occur.
Could you, or would you, go to that trouble? Thus, the system is immediately flawed. However, even if the election were determined after five or six recalculations, who is to say that the voters who didn’t enter alternatives, and there were a significant number of those, or those who over voted, meaning that they messed up the ballot by entering the ranking incorrectly, didn‘t dramatically affect the outcome?
Therefore, it is clear that while this system may, and I stress may, work for elections with three or, possibly, four candidates, it is unlikely that it will result in an acceptable conclusion when the list of candidates gets long. Now, Oakland is stuck with elected officials whose credentials as receiving a mandate to serve may be seriously undermined.
Runoff elections remain less than satisfying ways of selecting candidates. However, in the light of the Oakland experience, they may be the best of the available evils. Until we get an electorate that can handle the subtlety and nuance of a complicated ballot, and we have no evidence that they can handle something as simple as properly filling in a write-in ballot, we are stuck with it. ER
