How about this, instead of voting for just one candidate in an election, how would you like to rank everyone that’s running? Sounds complicated, but New York City is experimenting with what is called ranked-choice voting.
Lesson summary
Hi there, this is Jeff, and you are listening to Plain English Lesson 383 for Thursday, July 22, 2021. As so many of you already know, Plain English is the best place to upgrade your English skills with current events and trending topics. Today’s full and complete lesson is available at PlainEnglish.com/383. That’s where you’ll find the transcript, translations, how-to video, exercises, quizzes, and more. Visit PlainEnglish.com/383 for all this and more.
Coming up today, New York City is experimenting with something called “ranked-choice voting.” It’s a way to pick a legitimate winner when there are a lot of people running in an election. There are some definite advantages to ranked-choice voting, but as New York is finding out, there is one very, very big disadvantage. We’ll talk about all that in today’s lesson. And during the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English phrasal verb “square off.” Plus, JR has a song of the week. Let’s dive in.
New York tries new way to vote
Voting in a two-person election is simple: pick the candidate you like better (or dislike less). the candidate with the most votes is the victor. But in elections with more than two people, it gets complicated. In those cases, one candidate may win a plurality but not a majority of the votes. That means that one candidate won more votes than anyone else (a plurality), but not more than half or fifty percent of the total votes, which would be considered a majority. The winner, then, would have the support of less than half the voters. This is called the “first-past-the-post” system.
Here’s another difficulty with multi-candidate races. In a three-person race, you might have two candidates on the left politically and one candidate on the right. Let’s say that the left-wing candidates win 60 percent of the vote, but they split the votes equally, each receiving 30 percent. That would leave the right-wing candidate as the election winner with just 40 percent of the vote.
Something like that happened in two consecutive American presidential elections. In the year 2000, Ralph Nader, a relatively unserious left-wing candidate, pulled votes away from Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, in effect handing the right-wing candidate, George W. Bush the presidency with less than half of the total votes. Eight years earlier, the reverse was true, where the relatively left-wing candidate, Bill Clinton, won the presidency with just 43 percent of the vote after two candidates split the right-wing vote. This is called the spoiler effect when one long-shot candidate can spoil the majority for their own side.
To prevent this, many countries have a runoff system; France is an example. If a candidate doesn’t win a majority of the votes in the first round, the top two vote-getters square off in a second-round runoff election, with just the two remaining. But that also has its disadvantages. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and requires a second, unpredictable phase of campaigning. Not to mention, that the top two vote-getters may still not produce a clear or satisfying outcome.
There is an answer to this dilemma and that is called ranked-choice voting. Under a ranked-choice voting system, voters rank all the candidates in preferential order. So, they put their first choice at the top. And then they say who is their second -favorite, third-favorite, fourth-favorite candidate, and so on . If nobody wins a majority, then the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated. All of the losing candidate’s votes are then redistributed among the other top candidates, according to individual voter second-place rankings. The system continues, sequentially eliminating the candidates with the fewest votes, redistributing those votes according to preference, until one candidate is left with a majority of votes.
It’s complicated, but it works. Australia has been doing this for a century and Ireland at least 99 years. New Zealand has been holding this type of election since 2004 and several Canadian provinces also use this style of voting. A handful of American cities and states are trying it out. There are several clear advantages. The first is that it eliminates the spoiler effect, where a non-serious candidate can pull votes from the person who would otherwise be the winner.
Voters can also feel more comfortable voting their conscience. I can tell you this from experience. There have been times in crowded elections that I’d like to vote for one person, but I’m worried that person won’t win. So, I must choose the more realistic candidate to ensure that my vote counts. In a ranked-choice voting election, you can cast your first vote with your heart, and your second and third votes strategically.
Another advantage of ranked-choice voting is that the winner is more likely to gain a majority. True, the winner might not get a majority of first-place votes. But the winner is more likely to have a majority of the total votes when second and third preferences are considered.
Finally, ranked-choice voting also sends a clearer message about voter preferences. Instead of just A or B, yes or no, Republican or Democrat, left or right, a ranked-choice system lets voters say more about their preferences and values. Who do I really want, who would be acceptable, and who do I want the least: it’s possible to communicate all that on a ranked-choice ballot.
However, that brings us to the one big disadvantage of ranked-choice voting, it’s complicated. Many voters have a hard time deciding who their top choice is, never mind their second, third, or fourth-place preferences. The harder it is to fill in a ballot, the fewer people will do it. In American cities that have adopted the practice, voter turnout has fallen. It’s simply too much effort to figure it out. Yes, Americans often just don’t exercise their right to vote if it seems challenging.
Counting the votes is also more complicated: A ranked-choice system doesn’t always produce a clear winner immediately after the vote. As votes are counted, it’s impossible to say who’s leading the race because it depends on a complicated system of eliminating candidates and redistributing votes.
It’s also hard to understand the tallying and can be considered a less transparent way of doing things. In a first-past-the-post system, it’s easy to put up a graphic on television showing each candidate’s totals and a check mark next to the biggest number noting the winner. Anyone can understand that. But a ranked-choice approach involves a complicated series of calculations. This means, you just have to trust the system.
New York City passed the option to use ranked-choice voting in a 2019 referendum. The election for mayor will be in November. However, the city is heavily skewed toward one political party, the Democrats, so the primary election to choose the Democratic party nominee is the more important race in deciding who will probably win overall.
On June 22, 2021, New Yorkers went to the polls to choose the Democratic party nominee. Weeks later, they still didn’t have a decisive winner. The Board of Elections made the controversial decision of releasing preliminary results, which later changed significantly, causing voters to lose confidence in the system. You see, it’s a mistake to release preliminary results in a ranked-choice system because small changes in vote totals can cause big swings in the race results due to the elimination of lesser candidates. To complicate things further, the Board of Elections made mistakes in the counting and had to revise previously-released tabulations.
It’s not all bad news in New York, though. Many of the errors were mistakes in execution, not the design of the election itself. That means they can improve on it in the future. Eighty percent of voters said they prefer this style of voting; ninety-five percent said that they had no difficulty filling out the ballot. So, at least there’s that.
Runoff might be better…
I like the idea behind ranked-choice voting, but I think I prefer a runoff election instead. It’s very common around the world, but we don’t do a lot of runoff elections in the U.S. In a runoff, the top two candidates get a few weeks or months to campaign specifically against each other. It helps clarify the choice for voters and produces a majority every time. I’m unsure why, but it’s just not in our culture to do runoff elections.
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