The choice to rank in elections has pros, cons

Presidential election years always raise big questions about the way we vote, in part because the process can get kind of messy.

Caucuses in particular have been derided as old-fashioned, opaque or inaccessible. Their critics got a significant boost last week, when Iowa’s caucus was plagued by technological and human mistakes, delaying results and plunging the first official voting of the 2020 campaign into chaos.

But even before Iowa, a new idea was catching on for 2020: ranked-choice voting. At least four states that have relied on caucuses to choose their Democratic presidential nominees — Alaska, Kansas, Hawaii and Wyoming — will use the method to select their delegates this year.

Ranked choice changes the very act of voting by allowing people to shift their support from losing candidates to more viable options as the field narrows, essentially doing on paper what caucusgoers have typically done in person.

It has a complicated history and comes in many forms, but rankedchoice voting has been gaining converts across the United States in recent years. Several cities, including Santa Fe, now use it in municipal elections. Maine uses it for some state and federal elections, though many Republicans there wish it weren’t so.

On a ranked-choice ballot, voters can rank the candidates they like rather than choosing only one. The process varies; a ranked-choice presidential primary and a ranked-choice mayoral election would be structured differently.

But here’s a simple version: In a single-winner election, if no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those who marked that candidate as No. 1 get their second choice counted instead.

That can go on for several rounds until a candidate emerges with a majority. With ranked choice, voters can support outsider candidates without worrying about wasting their ballots. And candidates can win only with support — or at least tolerance — from a majority of the electorate, which can help prevent polarization.

That’s in contrast to the plurality or “first past the post” elections that are typical in the United States, in which candidates can win even if most voters oppose them, as long as the opposition is fractured.

Proponents of ranked choice say it can make campaigning less divisive. Ranked-choice elections sometimes beget campaign videos in which smiling opponents stand side by side and encourage people to vote for both of them. Candidates are more civil when they have an incentive to appeal to voters as a second or third choice, said David O’Brien, a staff lawyer with FairVote, an organization that promotes ranked-choice voting.

“Coming out of a primary, you end up having a nominee who has more support, and the primary itself probably hasn’t been as vicious and bitter as you might have seen otherwise,” he said.

Critics of ranked choice say it can upend electoral politics in unpredictable ways, cost money or dampen turnout. And in some states and cities where ranked choice has come up for a vote, opponents argued that the cause was supported by dark money or other outside funding.

In 2018, Paul LePage, a Republican governor of Maine who had won two terms in office without a majority, called ranked-choice voting “the most horrific thing in the world” and questioned its constitutionality. Republicans in Maine are still fighting it today.

And in New York in November, members of the NAACP and the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus spoke out against ranked-choice voting, concerned about lowering turnout.