Interactions with Other Reforms

Nonpartisan elections have become more popular as fears of hyper-partisan polarization increase and more elections are decided in the primary. Since RCV elections in the United States are predominantly local, nonpartisan contests, the literature on RCV provides an opening to examine some of the often understudied and underreported downsides to nonpartisan elections. Nonpartisan elections deprive voters of important information cues to help guide their choices, increasing the information costs of voting, and privileging wealthy candidates with name recognition. Nonpartisan elections, as one would expect, weaken the role of political parties in the electoral process, including their preeminent function as gatekeepers to candidacy. Nonpartisan plurality and top-two elections are known for a high incidence of vote splitting among minority candidates, which RCV appears to help alleviate.¹ But there are other ways in which adding RCV to nonpartisan elections does not help minorities. In "Ranking Candidates in Local Elections: Neither Panacea nor Catastrophe," Melody Crowder-Meyer, Shana Kushner Gadarian, and Jessica Trounstine found that minority candidates faced similar penalties in RCV and plurality nonpartisan elections. That is, absent partisan cues, many voters choose candidates based on race. In contrast, they found that adding partisan labels to the ballot significantly reduced the penalty candidates of color face among voters in both RCV and plurality elections.

Term limits have traditionally been associated with expanded opportunities for minorities to win office. This is predicated on the idea that historically underrepresented groups, including women and racial and ethnic minorities, are more likely to run and win in open seats than when challenging (presumably white) incumbents. In other words, open seats are viewed as opportunities to replace white men with people of other identities. However, the article "The Alternative Vote: Do Changes in Single‐Member District Voting Systems Affect Descriptive Representation of Women and Minorities?" by Sarah John, Haley Smith, and Elizabeth Zack, challenges this theory, finding that term limits were associated with an 82 percent decrease in the odds of a minority candidate winning election after the implementation of RCV (p < 0.01).² The effect of term limits on the odds of women and minority women winning was not statistically significant. Taken together, one possible explanation is that minority men are the incumbents most likely to be ousted by term limits in the RCV cities studied, while women and minority women have been able to take advantage of the open seats created by term limits to leverage their superior RCV campaigning skills. As we can expect more progressive, racially diverse cities to adopt RCV, this interaction between term limits and RCV should be studied more closely to ensure that the representational benefits accrued to other groups, especially minority women, are not outweighing electoral losses among minorities overall.

As we have seen in presidential primary races (pre-Trump) for decades—when parties consistently elevate (by any electoral formula) a middle-of-the-road candidate, parties can stagnate, until they erupt. As Mark Schmitt wrote in a recent brief on the interaction between different reforms in New York City’s primaries, there are opportunities to study how other reforms can work together with RCV to help ensure parties continue to evolve even as they champion the broadly acceptable candidates. For instance, the combination of RCV and small-donor matching in the New York City mayoral campaign produced a consensus nominee in the amply-financed Adams while also allowing a less ideologically mainstream candidate like progressive Maya Wiley to build support for her platform and gain traction as a potential back-up preference. “While more data is needed…a good hypothesis is that while the matching system gave several candidates enough to get their message out and begin to compete for votes, ranked-choice voting then made them relevant, quickly.”³

As early and mail voting become more prevalent, RCV could help reduce the incidence of wasted votes cast for candidates who withdraw shortly before Election Day. (In a plurality election, if your chosen candidate withdraws after you cast your vote, you’re out of luck. With RCV, if your first-choice candidate drops out, your vote will simply go to your next-ranked candidate.) Replacing multiple elections with a one-off RCV election should also save taxpayer money in the long term, on top of cost savings experienced by states that use universal mail voting.

So far, we haven’t seen consistent evidence that RCV in the United States helps or hurts independent or third party candidates, in large part due to the fact that most of the country’s RCV elections are local, nonpartisan races, in safe Democratic jurisdictions. Still, RCV certainly has the potential to bolster candidates who do not fit the hyper-partisan mold as we know it, but the system might be more effective in combination with other reforms to create opportunities for new party labels and organizations that can mobilize voters independently of the two major parties. Loosening ballot access laws is one option. Fusion balloting is another. By making it easier for additional parties to have ballot lines on a general election ballot, and to enjoy the benefits of being a recognized political party, more non-traditional parties can organize to mobilize voters to participate, even if they do not nominate candidates in a given election.

While lowering thresholds for minor parties to qualify for a ballot line is fairly intuitive, fusion is not. Fusion, in a nutshell, enables parties to cross-endorse candidates from another party. It was standard practice in the nineteenth century, but now it’s only used in six states, including New York. As Mark Schmitt wrote, “Fusion allows parties to thrive in the interstices between the major parties, often giving their ballot line to the candidates of one of the other parties, but sometimes not. In the past, the Liberal and Conservative Parties thrived under fusion: John V. Lindsay won reelection as mayor in 1969 on the Liberal Party line alone. But more recently, New York’s Working Families Party, a coalition of labor and community organizations, has used the system to thrive.”⁴ From the same article: “The Working Families Party rarely denies its ballot line to the Democratic candidate, but the possibility makes its endorsement uniquely valuable in a Democratic primary. This year, the WFP at first backed three candidates — an option that makes sense in a ranked-choice system — but ultimately put all its energy behind Wiley, boosting her into a close third.”

New York City’s arrangement with respect to both reforms is unique (RCV was used only in the primary; fusion is only in the general election), but it leads us to think more about how RCV and fusion, which both encourage bargaining and cross-endorsement between candidates, could work together in a general election context to encourage more minor party candidacies and provide more opportunities for parties that were given moderate influence under fusion voting a chance to actually win. At the same time, major parties in states that currently use fusion might be more wary of RCV.

Many would-be candidates who do not fit the mold of strong partisan Democrat or strong partisan Republican have been discouraged from seeking office after considering the large personal cost of seeking office and the reality that they will not fit well with either party. Most people who seek public office are social creatures. Adrift from both major parties is a lonely place to be. Again, this is an important reason to encourage the formation of new party organizations which can give candidates a campaign support network and a sense of belonging that they would not get from either of the two major parties. In addition to RCV, ballot access and fusion balloting would help facilitate this development.

Though these combinations haven’t been tested meaningfully yet in the real world, experimental surveys could prove the concept of such a blend, and lay the foundation for future study. Of course, there are trade-offs to consider. Recalling a previous section’s discussion on the causes of voter error, one unintended consequence of expanding ballot access in tandem with RCV could be that in adding new ballot lines and increasing the number of candidates on the ballot, ranking truncation and overvoting may increase as well.⁵

As discussed in the section on whether RCV increases voters’ sense that elections are fair, surveys suggest that Republicans both oppose voting reform and dislike our current voting system more than Democrats and independents. This presents a lose-lose proposition for electoral reformers who want to increase overall satisfaction with democracy. It also raises the possibility that satisfaction will not be found in voting rule changes. In a study of 30 countries between 1996-2002 (years vary by country), David Farrell and Ian McAllister tested the effect of electoral system characteristics on people’s satisfaction with democracy (i.e., sense of fairness).⁶ They found that proportionality, centrality of parties, and candidate-centeredness were only indirectly related to democratic satisfaction, whereas the ratio of residents to representatives was directly related: that is, the fewer voters per representative, the more satisfied the respondent with the system. This might seem out of step with what is happening with the American GOP, as Republicans are simultaneously overrepresented in the system, less satisfied with the system, and less inclined toward reform. But this points to an opportunity to explore how expanding assembly size (or even just district magnitude) might affect Republican attitudes, alone or alongside RCV.

Throughout this report, we’ve been confronted with the limits of RCV interventions to demonstrate much of an effect in certain areas. To be sure, some of these limits are due to the fact that it takes time for reforms to have much of an impact. Voters, politicians, and parties must all learn and adjust. Additionally, the effects of reforms at state and especially local levels may be hard to generalize from, given both that states and cities have their own unique dynamics, and that in an era in which so much politics is national, state-by-state reforms that attempt to encourage more compromise and civility and moderation are swimming against the tide of national hyper-partisan polarization. More profoundly, by maintaining single-member districts that allow for only one winner, RCV largely preserves the two-party system.. Though it is still possible it could encourage more diverse parties and independents over time, the evidence thus far is not encouraging. The tendency of single-winner elections to generate just two parties is well-known, studied and reaffirmed by many political scientists.⁷ As a standard rule, the larger the district size, the more parties. Larger district sizes increase the potential for more proportional electoral results, in which vote shares translate more clearly to seat shares in a legislature. As district size shrinks to one, the translation of votes to seats becomes more dis-proportional, which punishes smaller parties and discourages their formation.

There are many forms of proportional representation around the world. Most do not involve ranked ballots. However, the one form of proportional representation that does use ranked ballots is STV, which combines modestly sized multimember districts (typically around 5 seats) and ranked-choice voting. This system is currently used in the Irish parliament, the Australian Senate, and the Maltese parliament. Generally, election experts give the system high marks.⁸ Both the Irish and Australian experience with the voting system have been well studied.⁹

However, because STV is currently rare in the United States, there is limited U.S. data on its potential impacts. But researchers at the MGGG Redistricting Lab at Tufts University have pioneered a data‐driven approach for estimating the impact of STV on minority representation. This is particularly useful for litigators pursuing Voting Rights Act challenges, as it allows us to compare what might happen if a city were to replace an at-large plurality system with an STV system as opposed to the standard court-ordered cure of a single-member district plurality system with majority-minority districts.

For their 2020 paper, "Ranked Choice Voting and Minority Representation," MGGG Lab researchers Gerdus Benade, Ruth Buck, Moon Duchin, Dara Gold, and Thomas Weighill demonstrated a new methodology to project minority representation under multi-winner RCV (STV) and SMD plurality systems in four cases—judicial elections in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana; the county commission of Jones County, North Carolina; and the city councils of Cincinnati, Ohio and Pasadena, Texas—where at-large systems have been challenged by the courts for diluting minority votes and other violations of equal protection.¹⁰ The results were clear: “if given the choice between STV and single-member district plurality, STV is able to generate stable, proportional outcomes. The range of representational outcomes in a SMD plurality system, by contrast, is highly sensitive to the size and residential distribution of the minority group, and especially questionable in the case of low voter turnout.”

Multi-winner RCV, or STV, may also improve the diversity of racial representation in combination with other reforms. Political scientists Michael Latner, Jack Santucci, and Matthew Shugart tested how well district magnitude, assembly/council size, and electoral formula could account for racial representation by examining the election results from 159 ethno-racially diverse cities in 13 U.S. states and three more countries (Australia, Ireland, and the Netherlands) between 2010 and 2019. They found that larger assembly size and more contested seats per district are associated with more parties representing communities of color. The results suggest that electoral reforms that focus on, say, formula alone, but ignore the other features, might not be as effective at increasing racial and ethnic diversity among our representatives.¹¹

Regarding women’s representation (regardless of race or ethnicity), the literature suggests that STV would lead to more women being elected to office. Studies consistently show that more women are elected to legislative office in multi-winner systems, and particularly those with proportional representation. Most of this evidence comes from overseas, as only a couple U.S. jurisdictions use multi-winner proportional representation systems.

As we await new data from single- and multi-winner RCV cities and states in the United States, models and early studies like these, while far from ideal, should provoke more scholarly interest in STV and help create a foundation of credibility in a U.S. context.

Ranked-choice voting will be paired with a top-four open primary in Alaska in 2022. This will be an important test of a new reform approach that is gaining adherents in the political reform community, though now with a top-five open primary instead of a top-four open primary, and called “Final Five Voting.”¹² This potential combination is discussed more deeply in New America’s report on congressional primaries, which argues that it could be a worthwhile experiment under certain conditions. However, given that the research on both open primaries and ranked-choice voting both suggest minimal impacts to such changes, we should also expect somewhat minimal impacts from Final Five Voting (FFV). Nonetheless, Alaska will be an important test of the hypothesis that such a system can help moderates. If Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is able to win re-election despite a challenger from the far-right, this will be an important proof of concept. However, because Murkowski also won in 2010 as an independent write-in candidate after losing the Republican primary, it will be difficult to prove how much a potential 2022 victory was due to the new system, since she also won under the old system.

We will need to see a few more states using FFV to be able to evaluate it meaningfully. Ideally, these would be very Republican states, since FFV would be most likely to generate moderate candidates in states where conservative Democrats could combine with moderate Republicans to elect more centrist candidates.