I lived in New York and California for the first 47 years of my life and my vote never counted… I voted Democrat in heavily Democratic communities… now that I live in Plano, Texas I live in a politically diverse purple city and red state… I go to a Christian church and attend a public school with people who don’t share my politics… I share public space with people who do not see the world the same way I do… and guess what? I’m OK. However, I can engage in dialogue with people that I disagree with, because I recognize that I don’t own the truth and I actually have much to learn… we all do.
I agree with one of your main points, at the courts cannot mandate just representation, and any political tool used by one party can be also be used against it… I do not believe we have been particularly well served by having entrenched political parties that can be hijacked by extremes, or so homogenous that they basically have the same policies with a different cultural exterior…
The solution which I believe you’re getting it is agency, voice and local control so we have the broadest representation of who we actually are… and actual debate with our neighbors about how we live our values…
Thanks Matthew for your comment. However STAR Voting has never been used anywhere, except in a few private clubs. There is no history of it being used in any public elections to test it for unintended consequences, of which there will be many (for example, it encourages "bullet voting"). In addition, there is no voting equipment anywhere in the country that can run a STAR voting election, and there never will be because no vendor (Dominion, ES&S, Hart, etc) is going to do the software programming, design work, go thru testing by independent testing authorities, and get the STAR Voting module certified by a state's regulators because that process is long and expensive (approx $1 million) for each state, and they don't have any customers for that product since no jurisdiction is clamoring to use STAR. In fact, when STAR voting was on the ballot in Eugene OR last year -- a very liberal small city which, if STAR has any chance of passing the electorate, you'd think it would be Eugene -- and it only won 35% of the vote.
In short, STAR voting has no future in the US because it is a complicated method that neither election administrators, voters, elected officials or voting equipment vendors want to deal with. When I say RCV is "by far" the best alternative, one of my criteria is viability and whether it has a chance of succeeding with voters and being implemented by vendors and state and county election administrators. RCV easily passes that test, while STAR voting fails in every category.
True, RCV has been banned in some states, but what you didn't say is that the places it has been banned are states dominated by MAGA/Trump Republicans. They fear RCV because where it has been used it has allowed moderate Republicans (and in Alaska a moderate Democrat) to beat MAGA GOP candidates by building majoritarian coalitions opposed to the minority MAGA takeover of the GOP. If you are not aware of that, here is an article about it
I am fully aware of the RCV used in Alaska, I am also fully aware that STAR has never been used in any actual political elections in this country or in any other as far as I know. Go figure since it was only developed about a decade ago. I wouldn't expect it to become wide spread in such a short period of time, especially given the deep entrenchment that RCV and FairVote have in the minds of election reformers. It is a common mis-conception that RCV is "the best" and "only" alternative to first-past-the-post, and that just simply is not true.
I will also freely admit that if RCV was proposed nationwide I'd be first in line to support it, but not so much because I love RCV, but because FPTP is basically the worst possible option. Even simple approval voting is far superior to FPTP and that would be supported by every voting machine in the country automatically.
You must admit that while there are some very nice incentives toward compromise candidates in RCV, there are also quite a few drawbacks. Not the least of which (in this highly polarized political age) is suspicion about how tabulation works. If it looks like someone is winning early, and then starts not winning, even if the system is working as it should, that cause breed distrust of the voting system as a whole. Let alone the debacle that happened in NYC recently where they accidentally tabulated a whole slew of "demo" votes (for testing the machines), and they had to throw everything out and start the tabulation process all over again. RCV requires all ballots everywhere to be collected before they can start the instant run-off rounds. In the grand scheme of things we don't NEED to know the winner on election night, but the general public has become very used to that, and so anything that causes delays will be regarded as suspicious and fodder for the paranoid (and the MAGA) to further de-legitimize the system.
Therefore in my opinion, while I would prefer just about anything over FPTP, in my opinion RCV is clearly the wrong reform to target at this time.
Hi Matthew, thanks for your comments. A couple of your statements reflect a lack of understanding of RCV and how it works, especially as compared to other voting methods. Here they are:
“If it looks like someone is winning early, and then starts not winning, even if the system is working as it should, that cause breed distrust of the voting system as a whole.”
RCV is not the only electoral system in which a candidate can come from behind and win. In fact, in a two-round runoff that can and often does happen. Look at the recent Polish presidential election, in which Rafał Trzaskowski was first in the first round with 31.4% with his chief opponent Nawrocki coming in second with 30%, both advancing to the second round. In the final round, Nawrocki eked out a victory with 50.89%. And even with STAR voting, it is possible for a candidate who is initially in first place to lose. So that is not unique to RCV.
“RCV requires all ballots everywhere to be collected before they can start the instant run-off rounds.
No, this is not true. San Francisco, where I have lived for many years, does not have all the ballots counted or collected on election night, because California has a large number of mail-in ballots. Yet San Francisco runs the first RCV tally on election night with the ballots that they have. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, that is a fallacy that you and others have. Just like with a plurality election, with RCV you can run the tally (which only takes a minute to do, counted by the central tabulator) as soon or as often as you like. And when the election administrator announces the results for that night, he/she simply says, “these are the results as of today with the ballots that we have in hand. But we still have X number of mail-in ballots to count, so these are not final results.”
In San Francisco, the results for nearly all races using RCV are known on ELECTION NIGHT because most races are not close. So despite all ballots not being counted, and more ballots still to process, nevertheless it’s obvious who is going to win most races. But if the race is close, then “preliminary results” are announced with the caveat that there are still more ballots to count, and everyone knows that the winner is not yet clear. In SF the tally is run each day after 5 o’clock with whatever ballots had been processed that day, so the public has constant updated results. Maximum transparency.
This is no different than how a plurality election is tallied. Think about how may times you have gone to bed at night thinking that a particular ballot measure has won or lost, or a particular candidate has won or lost, in a close race. And then the next day, after more mail-in ballots are counted, suddenly you find out that the results have reversed. That happens in plurality elections all the time.
RCV is no different. Places like New York City or Alaska, where they take a week or so to announce election results is not because of RCV. It’s because of a (bad) policy choice made by those election administrators to not follow the procedure that San Francisco and MOST other places using RCV follow, which announces winners in most RCV races on election night. New York City and Alaska could easily adopt the San Francisco methodology and announce winners for most races on election night, with close races remaining undecided until more ballots are processed and counted (though AK has a slight complication that precedes its use of RCV, namely that by law the election admin cannot start counting any ballots in any races -- even non-RCV races -- until all mail-in ballots have been collected. AK is a big state and some people are voting from great distance, so this law was passed to accommodate those distant rural voters).
The best policy for counting RCV ballots is simple: "Count them early and often." That's what most jurisdictions do, with a few like NYC and AK having bad policy that could easily be corrected. And I imagine some day will be corrected, because the advantages of the "early and often" policy are what the public wants and deserves.
For sure, if someone has over 50% of the ballots on election night, then they are going to win, and it doesn't matter if you wait for more ballots to come in. Certainly in many non-competitive races the fact that run-off rounds cannot commence until all ballots are in and tabulated is not a draw back. But clearly, that is also not actually demonstrating RCV in action and working well. If RCV works well when there are only 2 competitive candidates, that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me.
Usually in FPTP elections they are too close to call when they are within, lets say 1%. Sometimes there are upsets to be sure, but by and large the election analysis industry is quite good at forecasting winners based on the sample of ballots already collected. That simply could not happen with as much reliability under RCV because very slight variations in the ranking order for the long tail of uncompetitive candidates can very quickly snowball into vastly different outcomes for the frontrunners. The order that candidates are eliminated in, and have their 2nd, 3rd etc places counted, starts to have a butterfly effect that makes the outcome quite difficult to predict, and impossible to report on other than 1st place votes, until all ballots are collected. As far as I am aware, the only numbers that are reported by election officials in RCV elections is who has the highest total votes at the time, and never tallies of 2nd or 3rd or 4th place votes.
Not to mention that as far as I am aware, RCV systems tend not to allow you to rank more than 3-5 candidates. If there are 10 people in the race, you can only rank the top 5. An important number to keep in mind for any RCV election is the number of exhausted ballots, where all of a voters choices were eliminated before the final round. I think that has proven to be one of the major sticking points in legal challenges against RCV. I think the courts that have ruled on the issue have indicated RCV is likely unconstitutional based on some voters having more voting power than others (due to exhausted ballots and the order of candidate elimination). But I am no constitutional expert, so take that with a grain of salt.
Suffice to say, the problems with RCV become quite apparent as the number of candidates (and especially competitive candidates) in an election increases.
It can also be debated whether or not necessitating a week or 10 days for some races to be called would be accepted by the population at large. I'm personally in favor slowing down the horse race of elections, but we do have to admit that the cries of election fraud are getting louder each cycle. The longer the delays in counting, the more believable those conspiracy theories tend to get (unfortunately).
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that candidates in RCV elections are not nearly as negative against their opponents as in FPTP, because they are trying to garner 2nd and 3rd place ranks. I just think that RCV has a lot of problems in the real world places where it has been used (not to mention the places where it was tried, and repealed after election debacles).
Hi Matthew, I appreciate your willingness to engage, but you have a lot of wrong information about RCV and how it has worked in actual elections. RCV has been used in nearly 1000 contests since 2004 (when it had its first use in San Francisco), and so there is a well-established track record that your strongly held opinions seems to be blissfully unaware of. Here are some responses to your claims (in two separate responses, since Substack limits the length of comments):
1. “If RCV works well when there are only 2 competitive candidates, that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me.”
Where did you get the idea that RCV only works well when there are two competitive candidates? There have been dozens of RCV contests in which there were three or more competitive candidates. As one example, in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor in New York City, which was won by Eric Adams, there were three to four competitive candidates and the original third-place finisher, Kathryn Garcia, ended up finishing second and lost to Adams by less than 1% of the vote. In the San Francisco mayoral election in 2018, there were three very competitive candidates; in the mayoral election in 2011 there were 5-6 competitive candidates. In the Oakland mayoral race in 2010, three very competitive candidates. There are dozens of other races out that had a number of competitive candidates. And other races in which there were only two competitive candidates, but that's the nature of elections, sometimes more or less. Nothing unusual here.
2. “That simply could not happen with as much reliability under RCV because very slight variations in the ranking order for the long tail of uncompetitive candidates can very quickly snowball into vastly different outcomes for the frontrunners. The order that candidates are eliminated in, and have their 2nd, 3rd etc places counted, starts to have a butterfly effect that makes the outcome quite difficult to predict, and impossible to report on other than 1st place votes, until all ballots are collected.”
Huh? No, this is not true at all. I don’t know where you are getting this information from. Seriously, are you just making this up on your own, or are you getting it from some website, like the STAR voting advocates who have been known for putting out a lot of bogus misinformation? As I said in my previous response, there is no difference between RCV and plurality elections in this regard. The election administrator simply runs the RCV tally as often as they want, preferably once per day. They run the tally on the data set that is available at that time. The next day, if they have processed more ballots, the data set will have changed a bit. So now you run the RCV tally on the new data set. Each day's tally gives a "preliminary result." You don’t run into any problems at all over the “order in which candidates are eliminated.” Certainly, you can have a situation in which running the RCV tally on today’s data set results in a different outcome than the RCV tally run on tomorrow’s data set, after new ballots have been processed and counted. And yes, the order of finish can change. But that’s no different than plurality elections, in which you have vote totals saying today that candidate Anderson is in first place, and then you count more ballots and the next day candidate Washington is in first place. That happens all the time in plurality elections, and it also can happen in RCV elections. There is nothing unusual about this. And there are nearly 1000 elections using RCV to backup what I am saying. I would recommend that you do some homework. For example, go to the website of the San Francisco Department of Elections, which has been using RCV for 20 years. They actually do a good job of showing the release of data as well as the RCV tallies for every day that they do the tally. You can pick out any race you want and follow along, day by day, on how the tally is conducted and how the results sometimes change in a close race. Nothing unusual about this.
3. “As far as I am aware, the only numbers that are reported by election officials in RCV elections is who has the highest total votes at the time, and never tallies of 2nd or 3rd or 4th place votes.”
Again, completely wrong. Go to the San Francisco Department of Elections website, you can see how every day they release round by round vote totals showing the tallies for that day using all available rankings, i.e. first, second, third, fourth etc. ALL rankings are included in the tallies.
4. “Not to mention that as far as I am aware, RCV systems tend not to allow you to rank more than 3-5 candidates. If there are 10 people in the race, you can only rank the top 5.”
Wow, seldom do I see a viewpoint from someone with so much wrong information. San Francisco allows TEN rankings. Other jurisdictions allow six (New York City) or eight rankings. Some jurisdictions only allow five rankings. In the early days of RCV, the voting equipment at that time only allowed three rankings. But that has not been the case for 10 to 12 years. And for those places that allow only five rankings, that is a policy decision that jurisdiction has made, it’s not based on what the technology allows, and has nothing to do with RCV. I don’t agree with that decision, but that decision is generally made for the ease of ballot design. As San Francisco and other places with more rankings show, it’s not necessary. Unfortunately there are some election administrators out there who are very cautious and make poor decisions for unsound reasons.
5. “I think the courts that have ruled on the issue have indicated RCV is likely unconstitutional based on some voters having more voting power than others (due to exhausted ballots and the order of candidate elimination).”
You're wrong. A number of courts have ruled on RCV, including in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Maine and some other places. Every one of them have ruled that it is constitutional. EVERY ONE. And they specifically took up this claim about “some voters having more voting power than others” and found that it had no legal merit and was based on a misunderstanding of RCV and how it works. That claim is related to another claim made, equally ridiculous, that RCV is a violation of “one person, one vote.” People who say that don’t even understand what the legal meaning of “one person one vote” means. In RCV, every voter is treated the same. Each voter has the same number of rankings as every other voter. This is no different than a plurality at-large election, where for example in an election to elect five city council seats, or school board seats, every voter has five votes to cast. The constitutional principle here is that all voters are treated exactly the same. Keep in mind, single-winner RCV is a RUNOFF system, sometimes known as “instant runoff voting.” Single-winner RCV and IRV are the exact same system. Every voter casts her/his vote for their preferred candidate, and in case that candidate can’t use their vote to win and is eliminated, that voter’s vote goes to their second choice as their runoff choices. And by using RCV/IRV a lot more voters will end up having their vote count for the eventual winner. They will have had their vote count toward their elected representative, instead of having it wasted on a losing candidate and having no more rankings, like in "one-rank plurality."
6. “Suffice to say, the problems with RCV become quite apparent as the number of candidates (and especially competitive candidates) in an election increases.”
No, this is not apparent at all. Again, there been nearly 1000 contests conducted using RCV. You simply can’t characterize RCV, in general, in a way that you have done. There are far more counterexamples that what you are saying is incorrect. Sure, someone who has an agenda can cherry pick whatever information they want to present a certain picture. Your statement is vague and contains no real info about what "problems" you are referring to.
7. “It can also be debated whether or not necessitating a week or 10 days for some races to be called would be accepted by the population at large.”
There is nothing to debate, it’s better to have quick election results, no question about it. And that’s what happens in most RCV elections. It’s just in a few of the high profile places like New York City and Alaska in which they have chosen a different policy for reasons that have nothing to do with RCV, as I wrote to you in my previous response. In Alaska, they have a law that predates use of RCV that requires election administrators to wait about a week (I forget the exact number of days) before they can start counting any of the huge number of mail in ballots coming from all of the very distant rural areas of Alaska.
8. “(not to mention the places where it was tried, and repealed after election debacles).”
RCV has been used in about 60 cities and a couple of states, and many places going back 20 years. Again, nearly 1000 contests conducted using RCV. I am aware of three places where it has been repealed – tiny Aspen CO, where a repeal was the result of a personal grudge between a couple of powerful political players, not because of any election debacle; Burlington VT, same thing, personal grudge from the Republican candidate who lost in a close mayoral contest because of the "ranked ballot coalition" of the Democrats and the Progressive Party and decided to attack the system when the elected mayor became unpopular -- not due to an election debacle. But guess what? Several years later, Burlington went back to RCV, and not just for the mayor’s race but for all city council races as well. Some election debacle! You forgot to mention that, oops!
The third place was Pierce County, WA, again not because of an election debacle but because the entire state of Washington used to use a blanket primary in which voters got to vote in any party’s primary they wanted to. So the major parties, Democrats and Republicans, sued and it went all the way to the US Supreme Court which ruled that Washington state, and California as well which had the same system, could not force the parties to use the blanket primary. So the parties chose to change it to a closed primary. The voters of Pierce County were very upset about that, so they adopted RCV with no primary at all as their response to being forced to have a closed primary. But then the voters of Washington passed a state initiative to force the parties to go to a top-two primary, which the Supreme Court decision had ruled would be constitutional. Once that happened, Pierce County voters decided to go to a top two primary instead of RCV, because they felt it was more similar to the previous “blanket primary” which they had never wanted to get rid of, but were forced to by the Supreme Court ruling.
No debacles their Matthew, just politics as usual. Even RCV, as great of a method as it is, can’t stop politics and politicians and voters from making the decisions that they think are best for them.
You have a lot of erroneous information Matthew. I hope you will do your due diligence, i.e. your homework, so that your viewpoint is more based in reality about how RCV has worked in nearly 1000 contests.
I lived in New York and California for the first 47 years of my life and my vote never counted… I voted Democrat in heavily Democratic communities… now that I live in Plano, Texas I live in a politically diverse purple city and red state… I go to a Christian church and attend a public school with people who don’t share my politics… I share public space with people who do not see the world the same way I do… and guess what? I’m OK. However, I can engage in dialogue with people that I disagree with, because I recognize that I don’t own the truth and I actually have much to learn… we all do.
I agree with one of your main points, at the courts cannot mandate just representation, and any political tool used by one party can be also be used against it… I do not believe we have been particularly well served by having entrenched political parties that can be hijacked by extremes, or so homogenous that they basically have the same policies with a different cultural exterior…
The solution which I believe you’re getting it is agency, voice and local control so we have the broadest representation of who we actually are… and actual debate with our neighbors about how we live our values…
No one said democracy would be easy !
I take slight objection to RCV being "by far" the best alternative.
STAR voting has highlighted all the problems with RCV. As well as RCV being banned in many jurisdictions.
Thanks Matthew for your comment. However STAR Voting has never been used anywhere, except in a few private clubs. There is no history of it being used in any public elections to test it for unintended consequences, of which there will be many (for example, it encourages "bullet voting"). In addition, there is no voting equipment anywhere in the country that can run a STAR voting election, and there never will be because no vendor (Dominion, ES&S, Hart, etc) is going to do the software programming, design work, go thru testing by independent testing authorities, and get the STAR Voting module certified by a state's regulators because that process is long and expensive (approx $1 million) for each state, and they don't have any customers for that product since no jurisdiction is clamoring to use STAR. In fact, when STAR voting was on the ballot in Eugene OR last year -- a very liberal small city which, if STAR has any chance of passing the electorate, you'd think it would be Eugene -- and it only won 35% of the vote.
In short, STAR voting has no future in the US because it is a complicated method that neither election administrators, voters, elected officials or voting equipment vendors want to deal with. When I say RCV is "by far" the best alternative, one of my criteria is viability and whether it has a chance of succeeding with voters and being implemented by vendors and state and county election administrators. RCV easily passes that test, while STAR voting fails in every category.
True, RCV has been banned in some states, but what you didn't say is that the places it has been banned are states dominated by MAGA/Trump Republicans. They fear RCV because where it has been used it has allowed moderate Republicans (and in Alaska a moderate Democrat) to beat MAGA GOP candidates by building majoritarian coalitions opposed to the minority MAGA takeover of the GOP. If you are not aware of that, here is an article about it
https://democracysos.substack.com/p/moderate-republicans-are-figuring
I would think that ability of RCV to empower non-MAGA Republican voters and majority coalitions would be something that STAR supporters would cheer.
I am fully aware of the RCV used in Alaska, I am also fully aware that STAR has never been used in any actual political elections in this country or in any other as far as I know. Go figure since it was only developed about a decade ago. I wouldn't expect it to become wide spread in such a short period of time, especially given the deep entrenchment that RCV and FairVote have in the minds of election reformers. It is a common mis-conception that RCV is "the best" and "only" alternative to first-past-the-post, and that just simply is not true.
I will also freely admit that if RCV was proposed nationwide I'd be first in line to support it, but not so much because I love RCV, but because FPTP is basically the worst possible option. Even simple approval voting is far superior to FPTP and that would be supported by every voting machine in the country automatically.
You must admit that while there are some very nice incentives toward compromise candidates in RCV, there are also quite a few drawbacks. Not the least of which (in this highly polarized political age) is suspicion about how tabulation works. If it looks like someone is winning early, and then starts not winning, even if the system is working as it should, that cause breed distrust of the voting system as a whole. Let alone the debacle that happened in NYC recently where they accidentally tabulated a whole slew of "demo" votes (for testing the machines), and they had to throw everything out and start the tabulation process all over again. RCV requires all ballots everywhere to be collected before they can start the instant run-off rounds. In the grand scheme of things we don't NEED to know the winner on election night, but the general public has become very used to that, and so anything that causes delays will be regarded as suspicious and fodder for the paranoid (and the MAGA) to further de-legitimize the system.
Therefore in my opinion, while I would prefer just about anything over FPTP, in my opinion RCV is clearly the wrong reform to target at this time.
Hi Matthew, thanks for your comments. A couple of your statements reflect a lack of understanding of RCV and how it works, especially as compared to other voting methods. Here they are:
“If it looks like someone is winning early, and then starts not winning, even if the system is working as it should, that cause breed distrust of the voting system as a whole.”
RCV is not the only electoral system in which a candidate can come from behind and win. In fact, in a two-round runoff that can and often does happen. Look at the recent Polish presidential election, in which Rafał Trzaskowski was first in the first round with 31.4% with his chief opponent Nawrocki coming in second with 30%, both advancing to the second round. In the final round, Nawrocki eked out a victory with 50.89%. And even with STAR voting, it is possible for a candidate who is initially in first place to lose. So that is not unique to RCV.
“RCV requires all ballots everywhere to be collected before they can start the instant run-off rounds.
No, this is not true. San Francisco, where I have lived for many years, does not have all the ballots counted or collected on election night, because California has a large number of mail-in ballots. Yet San Francisco runs the first RCV tally on election night with the ballots that they have. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, that is a fallacy that you and others have. Just like with a plurality election, with RCV you can run the tally (which only takes a minute to do, counted by the central tabulator) as soon or as often as you like. And when the election administrator announces the results for that night, he/she simply says, “these are the results as of today with the ballots that we have in hand. But we still have X number of mail-in ballots to count, so these are not final results.”
In San Francisco, the results for nearly all races using RCV are known on ELECTION NIGHT because most races are not close. So despite all ballots not being counted, and more ballots still to process, nevertheless it’s obvious who is going to win most races. But if the race is close, then “preliminary results” are announced with the caveat that there are still more ballots to count, and everyone knows that the winner is not yet clear. In SF the tally is run each day after 5 o’clock with whatever ballots had been processed that day, so the public has constant updated results. Maximum transparency.
This is no different than how a plurality election is tallied. Think about how may times you have gone to bed at night thinking that a particular ballot measure has won or lost, or a particular candidate has won or lost, in a close race. And then the next day, after more mail-in ballots are counted, suddenly you find out that the results have reversed. That happens in plurality elections all the time.
RCV is no different. Places like New York City or Alaska, where they take a week or so to announce election results is not because of RCV. It’s because of a (bad) policy choice made by those election administrators to not follow the procedure that San Francisco and MOST other places using RCV follow, which announces winners in most RCV races on election night. New York City and Alaska could easily adopt the San Francisco methodology and announce winners for most races on election night, with close races remaining undecided until more ballots are processed and counted (though AK has a slight complication that precedes its use of RCV, namely that by law the election admin cannot start counting any ballots in any races -- even non-RCV races -- until all mail-in ballots have been collected. AK is a big state and some people are voting from great distance, so this law was passed to accommodate those distant rural voters).
The best policy for counting RCV ballots is simple: "Count them early and often." That's what most jurisdictions do, with a few like NYC and AK having bad policy that could easily be corrected. And I imagine some day will be corrected, because the advantages of the "early and often" policy are what the public wants and deserves.
For sure, if someone has over 50% of the ballots on election night, then they are going to win, and it doesn't matter if you wait for more ballots to come in. Certainly in many non-competitive races the fact that run-off rounds cannot commence until all ballots are in and tabulated is not a draw back. But clearly, that is also not actually demonstrating RCV in action and working well. If RCV works well when there are only 2 competitive candidates, that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me.
Usually in FPTP elections they are too close to call when they are within, lets say 1%. Sometimes there are upsets to be sure, but by and large the election analysis industry is quite good at forecasting winners based on the sample of ballots already collected. That simply could not happen with as much reliability under RCV because very slight variations in the ranking order for the long tail of uncompetitive candidates can very quickly snowball into vastly different outcomes for the frontrunners. The order that candidates are eliminated in, and have their 2nd, 3rd etc places counted, starts to have a butterfly effect that makes the outcome quite difficult to predict, and impossible to report on other than 1st place votes, until all ballots are collected. As far as I am aware, the only numbers that are reported by election officials in RCV elections is who has the highest total votes at the time, and never tallies of 2nd or 3rd or 4th place votes.
Not to mention that as far as I am aware, RCV systems tend not to allow you to rank more than 3-5 candidates. If there are 10 people in the race, you can only rank the top 5. An important number to keep in mind for any RCV election is the number of exhausted ballots, where all of a voters choices were eliminated before the final round. I think that has proven to be one of the major sticking points in legal challenges against RCV. I think the courts that have ruled on the issue have indicated RCV is likely unconstitutional based on some voters having more voting power than others (due to exhausted ballots and the order of candidate elimination). But I am no constitutional expert, so take that with a grain of salt.
Suffice to say, the problems with RCV become quite apparent as the number of candidates (and especially competitive candidates) in an election increases.
It can also be debated whether or not necessitating a week or 10 days for some races to be called would be accepted by the population at large. I'm personally in favor slowing down the horse race of elections, but we do have to admit that the cries of election fraud are getting louder each cycle. The longer the delays in counting, the more believable those conspiracy theories tend to get (unfortunately).
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that candidates in RCV elections are not nearly as negative against their opponents as in FPTP, because they are trying to garner 2nd and 3rd place ranks. I just think that RCV has a lot of problems in the real world places where it has been used (not to mention the places where it was tried, and repealed after election debacles).
I hope you're enjoying this back and forth.
Cheers
Hi Matthew, I appreciate your willingness to engage, but you have a lot of wrong information about RCV and how it has worked in actual elections. RCV has been used in nearly 1000 contests since 2004 (when it had its first use in San Francisco), and so there is a well-established track record that your strongly held opinions seems to be blissfully unaware of. Here are some responses to your claims (in two separate responses, since Substack limits the length of comments):
1. “If RCV works well when there are only 2 competitive candidates, that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me.”
Where did you get the idea that RCV only works well when there are two competitive candidates? There have been dozens of RCV contests in which there were three or more competitive candidates. As one example, in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor in New York City, which was won by Eric Adams, there were three to four competitive candidates and the original third-place finisher, Kathryn Garcia, ended up finishing second and lost to Adams by less than 1% of the vote. In the San Francisco mayoral election in 2018, there were three very competitive candidates; in the mayoral election in 2011 there were 5-6 competitive candidates. In the Oakland mayoral race in 2010, three very competitive candidates. There are dozens of other races out that had a number of competitive candidates. And other races in which there were only two competitive candidates, but that's the nature of elections, sometimes more or less. Nothing unusual here.
2. “That simply could not happen with as much reliability under RCV because very slight variations in the ranking order for the long tail of uncompetitive candidates can very quickly snowball into vastly different outcomes for the frontrunners. The order that candidates are eliminated in, and have their 2nd, 3rd etc places counted, starts to have a butterfly effect that makes the outcome quite difficult to predict, and impossible to report on other than 1st place votes, until all ballots are collected.”
Huh? No, this is not true at all. I don’t know where you are getting this information from. Seriously, are you just making this up on your own, or are you getting it from some website, like the STAR voting advocates who have been known for putting out a lot of bogus misinformation? As I said in my previous response, there is no difference between RCV and plurality elections in this regard. The election administrator simply runs the RCV tally as often as they want, preferably once per day. They run the tally on the data set that is available at that time. The next day, if they have processed more ballots, the data set will have changed a bit. So now you run the RCV tally on the new data set. Each day's tally gives a "preliminary result." You don’t run into any problems at all over the “order in which candidates are eliminated.” Certainly, you can have a situation in which running the RCV tally on today’s data set results in a different outcome than the RCV tally run on tomorrow’s data set, after new ballots have been processed and counted. And yes, the order of finish can change. But that’s no different than plurality elections, in which you have vote totals saying today that candidate Anderson is in first place, and then you count more ballots and the next day candidate Washington is in first place. That happens all the time in plurality elections, and it also can happen in RCV elections. There is nothing unusual about this. And there are nearly 1000 elections using RCV to backup what I am saying. I would recommend that you do some homework. For example, go to the website of the San Francisco Department of Elections, which has been using RCV for 20 years. They actually do a good job of showing the release of data as well as the RCV tallies for every day that they do the tally. You can pick out any race you want and follow along, day by day, on how the tally is conducted and how the results sometimes change in a close race. Nothing unusual about this.
3. “As far as I am aware, the only numbers that are reported by election officials in RCV elections is who has the highest total votes at the time, and never tallies of 2nd or 3rd or 4th place votes.”
Again, completely wrong. Go to the San Francisco Department of Elections website, you can see how every day they release round by round vote totals showing the tallies for that day using all available rankings, i.e. first, second, third, fourth etc. ALL rankings are included in the tallies.
4. “Not to mention that as far as I am aware, RCV systems tend not to allow you to rank more than 3-5 candidates. If there are 10 people in the race, you can only rank the top 5.”
Wow, seldom do I see a viewpoint from someone with so much wrong information. San Francisco allows TEN rankings. Other jurisdictions allow six (New York City) or eight rankings. Some jurisdictions only allow five rankings. In the early days of RCV, the voting equipment at that time only allowed three rankings. But that has not been the case for 10 to 12 years. And for those places that allow only five rankings, that is a policy decision that jurisdiction has made, it’s not based on what the technology allows, and has nothing to do with RCV. I don’t agree with that decision, but that decision is generally made for the ease of ballot design. As San Francisco and other places with more rankings show, it’s not necessary. Unfortunately there are some election administrators out there who are very cautious and make poor decisions for unsound reasons.
5. “I think the courts that have ruled on the issue have indicated RCV is likely unconstitutional based on some voters having more voting power than others (due to exhausted ballots and the order of candidate elimination).”
You're wrong. A number of courts have ruled on RCV, including in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Maine and some other places. Every one of them have ruled that it is constitutional. EVERY ONE. And they specifically took up this claim about “some voters having more voting power than others” and found that it had no legal merit and was based on a misunderstanding of RCV and how it works. That claim is related to another claim made, equally ridiculous, that RCV is a violation of “one person, one vote.” People who say that don’t even understand what the legal meaning of “one person one vote” means. In RCV, every voter is treated the same. Each voter has the same number of rankings as every other voter. This is no different than a plurality at-large election, where for example in an election to elect five city council seats, or school board seats, every voter has five votes to cast. The constitutional principle here is that all voters are treated exactly the same. Keep in mind, single-winner RCV is a RUNOFF system, sometimes known as “instant runoff voting.” Single-winner RCV and IRV are the exact same system. Every voter casts her/his vote for their preferred candidate, and in case that candidate can’t use their vote to win and is eliminated, that voter’s vote goes to their second choice as their runoff choices. And by using RCV/IRV a lot more voters will end up having their vote count for the eventual winner. They will have had their vote count toward their elected representative, instead of having it wasted on a losing candidate and having no more rankings, like in "one-rank plurality."
6. “Suffice to say, the problems with RCV become quite apparent as the number of candidates (and especially competitive candidates) in an election increases.”
No, this is not apparent at all. Again, there been nearly 1000 contests conducted using RCV. You simply can’t characterize RCV, in general, in a way that you have done. There are far more counterexamples that what you are saying is incorrect. Sure, someone who has an agenda can cherry pick whatever information they want to present a certain picture. Your statement is vague and contains no real info about what "problems" you are referring to.
7. “It can also be debated whether or not necessitating a week or 10 days for some races to be called would be accepted by the population at large.”
There is nothing to debate, it’s better to have quick election results, no question about it. And that’s what happens in most RCV elections. It’s just in a few of the high profile places like New York City and Alaska in which they have chosen a different policy for reasons that have nothing to do with RCV, as I wrote to you in my previous response. In Alaska, they have a law that predates use of RCV that requires election administrators to wait about a week (I forget the exact number of days) before they can start counting any of the huge number of mail in ballots coming from all of the very distant rural areas of Alaska.
8. “(not to mention the places where it was tried, and repealed after election debacles).”
RCV has been used in about 60 cities and a couple of states, and many places going back 20 years. Again, nearly 1000 contests conducted using RCV. I am aware of three places where it has been repealed – tiny Aspen CO, where a repeal was the result of a personal grudge between a couple of powerful political players, not because of any election debacle; Burlington VT, same thing, personal grudge from the Republican candidate who lost in a close mayoral contest because of the "ranked ballot coalition" of the Democrats and the Progressive Party and decided to attack the system when the elected mayor became unpopular -- not due to an election debacle. But guess what? Several years later, Burlington went back to RCV, and not just for the mayor’s race but for all city council races as well. Some election debacle! You forgot to mention that, oops!
The third place was Pierce County, WA, again not because of an election debacle but because the entire state of Washington used to use a blanket primary in which voters got to vote in any party’s primary they wanted to. So the major parties, Democrats and Republicans, sued and it went all the way to the US Supreme Court which ruled that Washington state, and California as well which had the same system, could not force the parties to use the blanket primary. So the parties chose to change it to a closed primary. The voters of Pierce County were very upset about that, so they adopted RCV with no primary at all as their response to being forced to have a closed primary. But then the voters of Washington passed a state initiative to force the parties to go to a top-two primary, which the Supreme Court decision had ruled would be constitutional. Once that happened, Pierce County voters decided to go to a top two primary instead of RCV, because they felt it was more similar to the previous “blanket primary” which they had never wanted to get rid of, but were forced to by the Supreme Court ruling.
No debacles their Matthew, just politics as usual. Even RCV, as great of a method as it is, can’t stop politics and politicians and voters from making the decisions that they think are best for them.
You have a lot of erroneous information Matthew. I hope you will do your due diligence, i.e. your homework, so that your viewpoint is more based in reality about how RCV has worked in nearly 1000 contests.