How's That Ranked Choice Thingy Doing?

If you can figure this out, please let us know

Our local media noted, in passing, that Alaska elected a Democrat as its one (and only) Congressperson last week. Much was made of the candidate’s ties to indigenous peoples, but the real news, which eluded our top-notch editors, was that this was the result of the sort of vote—ranked-choice—being advocated by the people who thought up the proposed Portland City Charter.

This was Alaska’s first experience with ranked-choice voting, and one local progressive outfit thought the Alaska vote was just peachy…

Coalition of Communities of Color is an enthusiastic supporter of the Portland charter reform measure and urges a YES vote this Fall. Recent news from Alaska demonstrates the power of ranking candidates: voters used ranked choice voting to reject far-right Sarah Palin and send the first-ever Alaska Native to Congress, Mary Peltola. Portland can also expect more diverse representation along with a responsible and accountable city government if voters approve the measure this November.

(Note: CCC is “enthusiastic” because they were paid to do the Charter Commission’s “listening” and run their PR bamboozle. And their PAC, set up to evade their non-profit “non-political” status, is set to pour at least $200-grand into the campaign for voter approval.)

We won’t run through the Commission’s grand multi-part plan for the city’s future…but ranked-choice voting is a central feature. It will feed into their bizarre idea that each of four city districts (boundaries TK, natch) will be represented by three City Councilors, who will be elected using…well, it’s complicated.

Here’s one writer’s attempt to figure out how this thing works…

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice system, in each race, voters rank their choices in order of preference, and votes are counted in rounds. The Alaska Division of Elections counts all first choices. If a candidate gets 50 percent plus one vote in round one, that candidate wins and the counting stops. If not, counting goes to round two. The candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated. If you voted for that candidate, your vote goes to your next choice, and you still have a say in who wins in the second round. Voters are allowed to rank as many or as few candidates as they like. If a voter skips a ranking, their next ranking moves up — in other words, not listing a second-place choice means your third-place choice is re-ranked as your second-place choice. But if you skip two or more rankings in a row, only the rankings before the skipped rankings will count.

Got that?

It’s interesting to take a look at the official Alaska summary of how the final vote was shuffled, here. Note that the two Republican candidates, Palin and Begich, split the GOP vote, which was 112,783. Clearly, the majority of voters’ first choice was a member of the GOP. But that’s not what happened, according to the Alaska Elections Commission report…

And Peltola squeaked in. In a state that went to Trump by ten points in the last election. Even though first-round voters clearly wanted a Republican in office. And despite the fact that the winner, Peltola, vaulted, somehow, from getting 16,265 (10-percent) of the vote in the April primary. (More on that primary in a moment.)

It’s now clear that politicians, always a cunning lot, did their best to game the system, as National Review reported…

Republican congressional candidate Nick Begich reprimanded his rival, Sarah Palin, for Democrats’ Wednesday win in Alaska’s special election for its at-large seat, saying she cost the party by instructing “supporters not to rank candidates” in the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

Bad advice, as a Wall St Journal editorial pointed out…

One critique of ranked choice is that the winner in the end might depend on who initially comes in last. What if Ms. Palin had been eliminated first? Would most of her supporters have found Mr. Begich an acceptable second choice, at least compared with Ms. Peltola? If so, the second round might have catapulted him to a final GOP victory.

The state Division of Elections says it doesn’t have data on the second choices of the voters who picked Ms. Palin first. It isn’t sure whether such data will ever be collated and posted. The point is that ranked-choice voting encourages such strategic gamesmanship.

The real eye-popping number in the Alaska election was the large (and certainly decisive) 11,243 “exhausted” ballots. Not all could have been voters taking Ms. Palin’s stupid advice, but the fact remains that people who don’t want to play the ranked-choice game, or who just don’t like “any of the above” are, effectively, disfranchised. And that some people effectively get to vote more than once.

Let’s go back to Alaska’s April primary—an amazing list of candidates,48 in all, including “Dutchess, Lady Donna,” and “Claus, Santa,” who got 7,625 votes.

Which leads to the obvious question…what about the voters who must parse a laundry-list list of wanna-bes? And its corollary: how much do you trust the folks who put Measure 110, hard-drug decriminalization, over the top in the state? *

Golly! They’ll have to study the many, many pages of the Voters’ pamphlets, replete with candidates who seem to come out of nowhere and self-written propaganda.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty had a slightly different view…

This system asks voters to have a strong opinion about who their third-, fourth-, and even fifth-favorite candidates are, because how they rank people beyond the bronze-medal level could have real consequences! Now, maybe in a presidential primary, you might have a strong and clear sense of your top-five candidates . . . but in every race?

Our best guesses:

• Voters should expect more marginal candidates, even though you’ll probably only get to vote for four (can’t jam up the computers or the Clackamas clerk’s office) as the various racial/sexual-choice/progressive-crazy non-profits gather in back rooms to put together slates and ways to game the ballot.

• Inevitably, the power of unions and PACs will increase, since name-recognition will be the name of the game. Media’s “frames” and their decisions on who gets ink and air-time will become crucial (anyone seen an article about Rene Gonzalez in the big papers lately?). Expect a raft of “spoiler” candidates to mulch up the slip-slide of votes in the various rounds. Human ingenuity will know no bounds.

The Charter Commission confidently says that…

There is also growing evidence that ranked choice voting promotes more civil, issue-oriented campaigns and decreases the incentive for negative campaigning.

Geraghty, a student of real-world politics, differs…

The system effectively punishes a candidate who takes stances that are clear and bold, but potentially controversial. This also means the system effectively rewards candidates who are wishy-washy and inoffensive, and who avoid taking any stances that others might disagree with — mashed-potato candidates. A candidate’s best shot at winning is to be everybody’s second choice.

Prediction: those first few Portland ranked-choice votes will be doozies.

As it turns out, Maine, another state with ranked-choice voting, hired Nolan McCarty, professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, to evaluate the system.

As MaineWise reported…

The report’s author… found that RCV elections led to lower “full voter participation” rates in Maine in 2018 compared to the state’s plurality elections.

…and…

McCarty determined that as the number of candidates increased, so did the rate of ballot exhaustion. This finding, he argues, is consistent with the idea that ranking candidates is confusing for voters –– and that confusion only increases as more candidates are added to the ballot….

The report also indicates that those most at risk of ballot exhaustion are elderly people (those over age 65) and less-educated people (those without a college degree). 

…and…

…McCarty dispels one of the central arguments for RCV –– that it allows a candidate to win by a majority. He says this is incorrect because after ballots are exhausted, the number of valid ballots used to determine a majority is less than the number of votes cast. 

Winners, therefore, often fail to reach a true majority. In the 98 elections examined, he found this was the case for over 60 percent of winners…

Meanwhile, in San Francisco—surely a model of good government—the Washington Examiner reported…

By the final round of one San Francisco local election, more ballots had been thrown out than were counted toward the winner’s total.

Finally, consider a few parting shots:

• Every consideration of the Charter should require a recitation of a principle that has never changed—not a comma, not a jot—since Day One of the Commission’s deliberations…

  Increasing opportunities for historically under-represented communities to elect their candidates of choice has also been a driving goal for the Commission. Portland does not have a geographic distribution of Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) residents that could allow for a drawing of a majority BIPOC district, nor does it have the level of income or age segregation and stratification that characterizes other cities. The Commission favored reforms that would more likely give smaller and historically under-represented communities a greater ability to form coalitions to elect candidates of their choice.

• The beginning of the Democratic party’s hegemony over Oregon happened—total coincidence!!!—with the advent of vote-by-mail.

The moral of our tale: no political machine will ever do anything that will loosen its death-grip on power.

Let the games begin!

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*The ultimate tell is that the Charter Commission didn’t want to apply (and fought in court to prevent) ranked choice voting on the charter itself.