Ranked Choice

(Image from a London School of Economics article about Maine’s adoption of ranked choice voting)

Now that pundits have talked about the voting system used recently in Alaska, I’d like to step away from their noise for a few minutes.

You know someone who got elected to something that way. Me.

Decades ago. This voting system isn’t new.

I was running for a seat on the national Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women, a non-profit organization. That’s nowhere near the scale of running for Congress, but it was a political campaign. We called our voting system preferential voting. Sometimes it’s called instant runoff voting. When the UK considered changing to it several years ago, the government labeled it alternative voting. (First Past the Post gives such a huge advantage to incumbents, the government wanted to keep voting the way it is, so they made a better system sound dodgy. Their name for it contributed to that.)

Today we’ll use the current favored term ranked choice voting. Let me tell you how it works, how it changes campaigning and voting, and what it was like for me as a candidate.

It isn’t hard to understand how to vote that way. Let’s say you have five candidates running for an office. Your ballot lists them. You rank them in order of your preference. If you would be happiest with Sally winning, you put a 1 by her name. If you can’t have Sally in office, your second choice might be Chris, so you put a 2 there… and so on until either you run out of candidates to rank or you run out of candidates you would be willing to tolerate. Maybe you can’t stand two of the candidates. In that case, you would only mark your first, second and third choices, leaving blanks by the two you loathe.

When the votes are counted, first all the ballots are sorted into stacks according to the #1 choice on them. If the thickest stack is more than 50% of all the ballots cast, that candidate wins.

But if the thickest stack isn’t a majority, there isn’t a short new campaign cycle for a runoff election. The election workers pick up the thinnest stack and redistribute its ballots according to their #2 choice. Ballots that don’t have a #2 choice are set aside. If the thickest stack still isn’t more than 50%, the thinnest remaining stack is redistributed according to their highest ranked choice that is still in the count. This routine keeps happening until one of the stacks has a majority.

We had three Board seats to fill in my region and a bunch of candidates for them. The region used preferential (ranked choice) voting. The top vote-getter would become Regional Director, the highest ranking Board member for our region. The next highest two would get our other seats.

What did that mean for me as a candidate?

People wouldn’t make an either-or choice between me and everyone else. I needed to connect with people who agreed with and approved of me, just as I would in any campaign. But I also needed to connect with people who agreed with and approved of me only some of the time. Maybe I wasn’t their favorite, but could I persuade them to make me their second choice? Their third?

When an election goes into a runoff, the candidates who got the two highest vote tallies have another chance to make their case to people who didn’t vote for them in the first round. They can look at who didn’t make it into the runoff and tweak their campaigns to woo supporters of those candidates.

When an election is by ranked choice, as a candidate you have to make your whole appeal to the voters up front. Who you are is all you’ve got, period. If you aren’t the favorite of enough of them to win in the first tally, you need enough other people already convinced that they would settle for you as a compromise. They have to believe you’ll do right by them. You’ll pay attention to them and work for them even if you weren’t their first choice.

As a candidate, I needed to demonstrate that I listened to, engaged with and respected people I didn’t agree with completely. My people skills were certainly not stellar. I wasn’t sure I could squeak into a Board seat at all. Janell Jenkins managed my campaign (and me). If not for her, I would have failed miserably.

In a workshop at the conference where the election happened, there was a moment when I thought I blew my chance completely. A hot topic came up, one in which members tended to have strong polarized opinions. I voiced mine, which I knew some of the workshop attendees vehemently didn’t like. Other Board candidates in the room didn’t voice theirs. After the election, a handful told me that was the moment when I got… not necessarily their first choice vote, but better than they would have given me before. They didn’t agree with me, but I let them know where I stood, made my reasoning clear and from the way I put it, they felt I understood and respected theirs. They noticed the other candidates didn’t say anything and didn’t engage with them.

Compare that with what has become common in too many campaigns where the runoff system is still used, how strident the platforms can become, how adversarial… What matters there is recruiting people into your camp, and there is little incentive to engage with any other camp even if it is only a little different from your own.

Late at night, I got word that I had been elected Regional Director by a margin of three votes in the fifth tally. That means the ballots were sorted, and then the thinnest stacks were redistributed four times before my stack got high enough to win.

The impact of a ranked choice election doesn’t stop after the results are announced. If an election goes into a runoff and the result is not terribly close, the winner may feel cocky about it. By contrast, I knew I didn’t have a mandate. I got in because barely enough people decided I would do if they couldn’t have who they most wanted. I knew I’d have to work my socks off.

Back then I didn’t think much about how our voting system discouraged polarization, the ways it shaped me and how it motivated me. It’s worth thinking about. Alaska has that now. Maine went to it a while back. Personally, I believe it’s a good system. I’d like to see it used in more places.