Gotta rank ’em all?
Or just the ones you can stand? New voting system has some pitching different strategies to get your preferred candidate in office
No voter in the history of the state has had more choices than the Santa Fe city resident in the 2018 mayoral election.
With hundreds of different ways to rank the five-candidate field, the 25-bubble ballot presents a choose-your-own-adventure decision tree, vastly more involved than what is offered by the erstwhile plurality system: One vote for one candidate, most votes wins.
Now a voter may rank all five. A voter may rank two, four, only one. A voter may rank one, skip three slots, then rank another — though skipped slots are ignored by the algorithm, meaning such a “fifth-place” vote, perhaps intended as an insult or an attempt to tank a disliked candidate, would count as a second choice. Lots to think about. The myriad possible combinations of how a Santa Fe voter can vote in the city’s inaugural ranked-choice election have perhaps unsurprisingly given way to as many ideas about how one should.
In one corner, there are those, including some of the candidates,
who have urged voters to rank the full slate, warning anything less can “exhaust” a voter’s ballot and run counter to the spirit of a system intended to produce a victor who can claim majority support.
In the other, the prevailing view is to rank only the candidate or candidates you wish to support, or else risk your vote at some point being counted for a candidate you do not like.
And there are many still somewhere in between, puzzling over how their individual ballot arrangement might carry through the round-by-round elimination process that’s activated if no one candidate wins a majority of the first-choice votes.
“People are all over the place,” said Maria Perez of FairVote New Mexico, a ranked-choice advocacy group that has been holding voter-education events in the city. During a mock election held Thursday at Second Street Brewery, participants tasted a selection of craft brews, pondering the qualities of each, and painstakingly ranked the five beverages on a bubble-filled ballot.
The conversations about rankedchoice voting reflect the confusion of a mid-campaign shift to a new election format.
And the how-to-rank considerations are hardly immaterial to the outcome of the mayoral race between City Councilors Peter Ives, Joseph Maestas and Ron Trujillo, school board member Kate Noble and entrepreneur Alan Webber, as well as two
City Council races in which there are three candidates apiece.
If no candidate crosses the 50 percent-plus-one-vote threshold, the rankings come into play: The last-place candidate is eliminated. Voters who selected that candidate first see their votes transferred to their next-ranked candidate, and the process continues until one candidate can claim a majority of the voters who remain in play.
‘Rank as many as possible’
The city’s official stance, on its votedifferentsantafe.com voter-education site, is to encourage voters to rank all five mayoral candidates. In this scenario, a voter has expressed her fullest possible franchise, scaling the entire field in her order of preference, making sure her ballot will count until the last, no matter which candidates are cut.
“It’s your vote, and you have a right to cast it however you want,” said Matt Ross, the city’s public information officer, leading the voter outreach effort. “At the end of the day, you will be able to cast a ballot that’s blank, if you really want to. But the reason we say ‘rank as many as possible’ is we want their vote to be counted in that second, third, fourth round, if it goes that deep.”
Although the city races are nonpartisan, and every candidate in the notably and at least publicly cordial mayoral race is a registered Democrat, there is enough elbow room between the rivals and their supporters to make the idea of ranking all of them offensive to some hard-core supporters.
There is, then, a diet version of this pitch. Rob Richie, executive director of the national, Maryland-based FairVote, advises a voter to “rank until you’re indifferent,” though he, like Ross and Perez and others, emphasizes that more is more.
“Mathematically, there’s no reason to not keep ranking,” said Richie, who’s been following the race in Santa Fe, the 12th U.S. municipality to use a rankedchoice system. “If you have any difference of opinion on the remaining candidates, we suggest you should continue your rankings. … It’s not a point system. It’s not a system where your indication of support for your second choice undercuts your support for your first choice. Every ranking helps that person beat the next person you have ranked.
“It’s a chance to express a difference that might count between your remaining choices, which would count if your first choice is out,” he added.
Viewing the election as a “runoff ” can help straighten out a voter’s considerations,
many in the rank-more camp agree. They ask voters to think of the ranked-choice algorithm as performing the same function as a traditional runoff, in which top finishers from a larger field advance to a second one-on-one election, in a compressed format.
Ranking alternatives ensures your vote will play in the later “rounds” of the runoff, should your first preference be eliminated, Perez said.
“The more candidates you rank, the harder your ballot will work for you, and the more you’re choosing to participate in a democratic process,” Perez said.
“You want people, if they have a preference, to indicate it,” Richie said.
Don’t like ’em? Don’t rank ’em
But Frank Katz, a former city attorney, said he has come to view the “order of preference” concept as a misnomer, one that could trip up voters who might now think to rank candidates — and thus, to some degree, vote for candidates — with whom they’re not familiar or less than fond of.
“If there’s someone you do not want, do not rank them,” Katz said. “If you rank them at the bottom, you’re still voting for them.”
If a voter has ranked all five candidates, her fifth-place vote will never come into play (because if her four higher-ranked candidates have been eliminated, the election is over). But bubbling in the circle next to a candidate’s
name, no matter which slot on the ballot, is effectively an implicit endorsement of that person’s bid for office, said Richard Molnar, a retired longtime mathematics professor, and should be treated as such.
“Don’t rank for the sake of ranking,” Molnar said. “If I rank somebody, that means it is somebody I would vote for if the candidates that came before them were not there. If you’re not willing to vote for somebody, you shouldn’t rank them.”
The city agrees, and Ross said the voter-education effort has incorporated this caveat into its explanations of the system. “If there’s somebody you cannot stand, you cannot stomach your vote going to that person, your best strategy is to leave them off entirely,” Ross said. “If you put them on there, it’s because you’re comfortable voting for them.”
Questions of math, morality
Raymond N. Greenwell, another longtime mathematics professor, argues ranking all of the choices is a matter of principle.
“People seem to think, ‘I like A and B, but I don’t like C, D or E; I’ll just vote for A and B and not rank the others,’ and that’s fine if A or B wins,” Greenwell said. “But you have to ask yourself: What if the other voters disagree with you, and A and B are knocked out? Then it comes down to C, D and E, and what you’re essentially saying is, ‘I’m not
going to vote in that election.’ ”
“Well, that’s just wrong,” Greenwell went on. “My personal feeling is you should always vote. If they are candidates you don’t like all that much, vote for the candidate you like most out of candidates you don’t like all that much.”
“If you believe everyone should always vote, it logically follows you should rank all the candidates,” he said.
But the heart ranks what the heart wants, and ranking beyond a favorite or favorites strikes some others as poor form — or worse.
“I’m concerned people might be badgered into potentially supporting or voting for people they just don’t like,” Molnar said. “It seems to me it’s almost criminal. Let’s say one of the candidates advocates a policy you really despise — it’s outrageous. But you rank them, and they win. How can you ever complain that they try to implement that policy? You voted for them.”
“Vote for the people you support,” Molnar said flatly. “It’s simple.”
The debate and conversations surrounding how best to approach the new system, however, have been anything but simple, warned former City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, as they are “often accompanied by the words, ‘It won’t work right if you don’t do it our way.’ ”
Easing problems at the polls
Another wrinkle is that the voting machines will prompt a voter with a notification message if she has not ranked all of the candidates in each of the races on her ballot. The message asks a voter to decide either to cast the ballot as is or complete the rest of the ranks.
“I don’t know about long lines, but we could have slow lines,” Heldmeyer said.
City Clerk Yolanda Vigil said the 12 voting convenience centers spread through the city would each have more voting machines and poll workers than in past elections. This should smooth the process and ensure voters’ questions or concerns can be quickly handled, Vigil said.
“We’re going to do whatever we can to make it easy and not have voter confusion,” Vigil said.
The helpers on hand won’t be rankedchoice strategists, however. Voters will make those calculations themselves.
In the 2011 mayor’s race in Portland, Maine, in 2011 — a nonpartisan election, the city’s first with ranked choice — 17 percent of ballots were exhausted over the course of the “instant runoff,” according to a FairVote analysis of the 2011 result, meaning roughly 1 in 5 voters did not rank either of the two finalists anywhere on their ballots.
In the Minneapolis mayoral election last fall, 22 percent of ballots were exhausted by the end, according to that city’s online vote results. Voters there may only rank up to three candidates.
Richie estimated most ranked-choice elections produce a result in which something between 10 percent and 20 percent of ballots are exhausted. In Santa Fe, with five candidates, each of whom is a public figure with some level of local name recognition, he predicted the number would be toward a lower bound, because voters are familiar with and likely have some sort of opinion worth expressing through the ballot about each.
“If people really do not like a candidate, if they really, really, really, really would rather not rank a candidate? I tell them rank as many candidates as you could possibly support, to some extent,” said Perez, of the state FairVote group.
The question — whether to vote for only those you support or whether to consider your support on a gradated scale — is best answered, Ross said, by ensuring voters fully grasp the new format, understand the consequences of their ranked-choice choices.
“I’m optimistic people, generally speaking, understand it and will be able to fill out their ballots correctly and get them cast the way they want to cast them,” Ross said.
“That’s our best possible outcome,” he added. “Even if people decide not to participate in ranking their choices, they understand the system.”
Contact Tripp Stelnicki at 505-428-7626 or tstelnicki@sfnewmexican.com.