In the eyes of millions of American voters, the 2020 Presidential election was between the lesser of two evils. Fueled by their hatred and lack of respect for the sitting president, many voters turned out to the polls only to vote against Donald Trump, rather than in earnest support for Joe Biden. The enormously popular “Settle for Biden” movement encouraged voters from all sides of the political arena to set aside their beliefs and vote for Biden simply to get Trump out of office. The movement led millions to wonder why they should ‘settle’ for a system that forces them to vote against who they hate most rather than the candidate that most closely aligns with their values.
An alternative voting system that has gained increasing popularity in the United States is ranked-choice voting (RCV). Ranked-choice voting is an electoral system in which voters rank candidates by preference. The winner must always obtain a majority, not plurality, of first-choice votes. If no candidate obtains a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated and votes for the eliminated candidate are redistributed to the voter’s second-choice. After this adjustment, a new count is conducted to see if a majority winner prevails. This process repeats until there is a candidate with a clear majority of first-choice votes.
RCV addresses frustrations with the two-party system by allowing numerous candidates to run without fear of splitting the vote. Two parties tend to dominate the first-past-the-post system, excluding small parties and thus forcing voters to decide between two candidates they may not agree with or ‘throw away’ their vote by voting for a small party that has no chance of winning. Unlike the first-past-the-post system, the RCV system does not limit the number of candidates that can run, which allows citizens to vote for candidates they support rather than strategically against candidates they oppose. Proponents also claim that RCV elections get rid of the ‘spoiler effect’, a byproduct of first-past-the-post’s two-party dominance in which third party candidates split or ‘take away’ votes from dominant party candidates who share many of the same positions on the issues and are more likely to win. However, ranked-choice voting has its fair share of critics. Many opponents of RCV argue that the system is too time-consuming and has the potential to discourage and disenfranchise voters. Some even go as far as to claim that the system is undemocratic as it violates the long-established principles of “one person, one vote” and majority rule.
We can go back and forth about the pros and cons of RCV as much as we want, but the debate is premature. Attacks on the integrity of our electoral system are increasing in number and severity, bringing to light the organizational and procedural weaknesses of American elections at all levels of government. Popular frustrations with recent elections mostly center around dissatisfaction with the two-party first-past-the-post system, but these frustrations cannot be addressed until our government’s electoral administration is consistent enough on the procedural level to handle change. While ranked choice voting has the potential to solve many of the problems the public has with our current electoral system, its full potential cannot be realized if the government is not able to functionally conduct elections without creating some form of political controversy.
While RCV is used in other developed nations and has recently been implemented in various local and statewide elections in the United States, New York City’s 2021 mayoral primary was the most important test the system had ever faced. In America’s most populous city with a substantial record of poor election administration and an electorate that was more than eager to see a change in leadership, proponents and skeptics of RCV alike put the dubious functionality New York City’s Board of Elections under serious pressure to demonstrate workable, accurate data on the efficacy of RCV. Since the days of Tammany Hall, the only thing New York City’s B.O.E has reliably demonstrated is a notorious reputation for corruption and dysfunctionality. The New York State Constitution puts party bosses in charge of appointing staffers to municipal election boards, placing the fate of free and fair elections on the shoulders of unqualified and incompetent political partisans who have little to no incentive to do their job properly- if at all. With the context of New York City’s questionable electoral record in mind, it becomes clear that most of the criticisms leveled against RCV after the election were not grounded in the method itself but rather were based on the consequences of relying on a functionally lacking B.O.E to effectively roll out the information and directives necessary for RCV to work.
A major administrative blunder by the B.O.E appeared to validate the criticisms of opponents to the system in their claims that RCV’s complexity inherently creates unnecessary complications and confusion. In taking a closer look into the blunder in the context of the B.O.E’s dubious track record, it is clear that the chaos that ensued around the results was a consequence of the B.O.E’s ineptitude rather than inherent flaws in RCV as a voting system. A week after the election, the B.O.E released unofficial preliminary results from the Democratic primary and then quickly removed the results from their website due to an undescribed “discrepancy”. Later that night, the board released a statement admitting that officials failed to remove approximately 135,000 test ballots from the voting software before beginning the official ballot count and that the count would have to be restarted. This blunder only included ballots cast in-person, further lengthening the process as an additional 124,000 absentee ballots still had to be counted after the recount of in-person votes. Mayor-elect Eric Adams was not announced as the official winner of the Democratic primary until mid-July, a fact that many opponents of RCV cited as proof of the new system’s intrinsic flaws. While it is true that it takes longer to obtain official election results under RCV than under FPTP due to the processes of elimination used to reach a clear majority winner, the errors of the B.O.E greatly exacerbated the necessary time it takes to obtain results in RCV elections. Additionally, the chaos and confusion around the results allowed opponents of RCV to overlook the role of the Board’s gross negligence in the tumultuous election and cite the blunder as evidence for their arguments that the system is too procedurally complicated for municipal governments to implement effectively. The erroneous ballot-count controversy was objectively the fault of the B.O.E’s dysfunction, but for many, the NYC mayoral primary was the first time they had heard of RCV or seen it in action. Anyone who has voted in New York City knows that the B.O.E is incredibly dysfunctional, but for most New Yorkers, RCV is an entirely new concept. It is therefore all too easy for the average voter to negatively associate RCV with the disorganization, lack of transparency, and arbitrary complexity characteristic of the city’s B.O.E. New York City was RCV’s largest and most important test to date, but because of the B.O.E’s well-documented ineptitude and disorganization, it never stood a fighting chance.
Since RCV had not been implemented on a scale capable of demonstrating truly considerable implications for national voting reform in the U.S. until the New York City mayor’s race, both critics and proponents of the system primarily resorted to citing the potential for RCV to improve or damage American democracy in their respective arguments. As the use of RCV in major Bay Area cities over the past 17 years has demonstrated, when a government is functionally able to execute fair and free elections, the implementation of RCV is successful and its positive potential impacts materialize. In New York City, where the municipal government had previously proven itself to be incapable of executing free and fair elections, the negative potential effects of RCV materialized and the election was seen as a total failure. From this comparison, it becomes ineluctably clear that the success or failure of RCV is entirely dependent on the ability of a municipal government to conduct procedurally sound elections. Thus, it is impossible to understand or evaluate the practical efficacy of- let alone implement- RCV or any other systemic voting reforms that have the potential to resolve popular grievances with elections independently of the quality of the B.O.E charged with implementing them unless serious bureaucratic reforms are put in place at every level of electoral administration. Ranked-choice voting could very well be the solution that the frustrated American electorate has been looking for, but we will never know as long as our governments are incapable of properly implementing and executing it.