by Jack Santucci
I have started a bibliography of recent, empirical, and peer-reviewed work on ranked-choice voting.
My hope is that the page will be useful to policymakers and researchers. So far, it covers burdens on voters, burdens on election officials, effects on candidates and parties, causes of adoption/repeal, and book-length historical accounts.
Please reach out if you have something to add.
I have an op-ed today in the New York Daily News. It opens:
It was a strange coalition that opposed ranked-choice voting in New York City last week: conservative Republicans and black elected officials. Even stranger was that both groups made the same sorts of arguments, claiming RCV would fuel voter confusion and depressed turnout, especially in minority communities.
Since that sort of coalition its likely to appear elsewhere, we may want to unpack its logic. Doing so means learning about two kinds of ranked-choice voting. And understanding that as long as people keep pushing the single-winner form, Republicans and voting-rights groups are likely to keep fighting it.
This was a difficult piece to write, and if you know me, you know why.
I also want to thank those people whose ideas appear at various points. If you are reading, thank you.
And, yes, I now remember that it was Hare/Andrae. Sorry!
Next month, New York City voters will decide on Question 1. This would establish the Alternative Vote for party primaries and special elections to the offices of Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Borough President, and City Council. It also would mandate that Council redistricting be completed by the time that candidates can begin collecting signatures. Finally, it would extend the period for early voting.
There has not been much visible opposition. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has a good, short summary of the charter review process.
Historically, the local media have been important in such matters. Therefore, it is useful to compile newspapers’ positions on the measure. This is not a systematic survey — just the result of an hour’s Google search. I may update the post as new information appears.
Continue reading “Newspaper positions on #YesOn1 (RCV in NYC)”
Nearly three years ago, I had a long-ish post on the “voter confusion” question in ranked-choice elections. The core point was that invalid-ballot rates seemed to surge when movement-type people ran for office. Presumably, they were mobilizing the sorts of voters who either hadn’t voted before in an RCV election, or had the sort of socioeconomic profile that one might associate with ballot error.
The new insight is “X voting.” This is an old term for when people use the letter X to mark an RCV ballot. As you can see from my sample ballots, it seems to have been a big problem. The very first instruction on these ballots is: “DO NOT USE X MARKS.”
Rates of invalid voting in New York City were staggering. In Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1941, for example, the invalid rates approached 20 percent. About one quarter of that came from blank ballots. (Data on blank ballots do not exist after 1941.) Here is the graphic from the original post:
Here’s how we know that voters were using multiple X marks. The rules were very inclusive. If you voted with just one X, that was taken as your first-place ranking, and the ballot counted as such. If you voted with a combination of X’s and numbers, the X’s were disregarded. So, for a ballot to be invalid, it had to contain only X’s, and more than one of them. More on that from this tweet thread.
The city could have stopped all this by moving to IBM’s STV voting machine. There are references to this machine in the 1937 city charter, in fact, so people were aware of the problem and intended to solve it. I am not sure why the solution never came.
Here are more invalid rates from very early STV elections, both in the U.S. and Canada. Some are alarmingly high. We also see that they tended to decline as there was more public experience with STV. Something must have improved — voter education, ballot designs, party coordination, whatever. The data come from Mott (1926).
Aside from using a voting machine that does not permit X voting, reformers could have promoted Gosnell’s “list system with single candidate preference” — otherwise known as open-list proportional representation (OLPR). I don’t have the statistics handy, but I think that versions of this are the most common type of PR in countries without mixed-member systems.
Gosnell called for a “single candidate preference” because reformers at the time were intellectually committed to the single transferable vote — “if your vote doesn’t count for your first choice, it counts instead for your second,” and so on. But Gosnell’s OLPR system could have worked with multiple votes too — the sort of X voting that drove up these error rates. It also could have been made to work with multiple votes across different party lists (i.e., ticket-splitting).
Final thought: I do not want to suggest that RCV is a bad idea, destined to generate mass confusion and disenfranchisement. We do not live in 1941, and no American voter is asked to mark RCV ballots with a pencil anymore. (Although, if we must have PR, I am starting to prefer open lists.)
A related issue is that we do not know what ballot invalidity is like in non-RCV races, especially when voters are asked to express more than one preference. I am thinking here of at-large elections. Studies of that are pretty rare, and we need more of them. One such study is this.