Conn. lawmakers express skepticism about ranked choice voting
During the race for Connecticut governor, both incumbent and triumphant Gov. Ned Lamont and his Republican opponent, Bob Stefanowski, committed to support ranked choice voting if they were elected.
That earned Lamont a cross endorsement. Yet, despite those commitments and significant support from minor parties in the state, Lamont stopped short of making it a priority this year.
“Ranked choice voting is another potential option to maintain the health of our vibrant democracy,” Lamont spokesman Anthony Anthony said in an email statement. “In November, voters showed us with the successful passage of the early voting ballot initiative they want more democracy, not less. As a result, ranked choice voting remains a possibility in Connecticut.”
In ranked choice voting,
you vote by preference, marking your first choice, second choice and so on. If any candidate gets a majority — not just a plurality but actually more than 50 percent of the vote — they win outright. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent, the lowest performing candidate gets wiped off the ballot and there is a new count, and so on until that 50 percent is reached.
Ken Krayeske, who ran an unsuccessful bid for attorney general on the Green Party ticket, was skeptical that ranked choice voting would move forward in the state any time soon.
“I hope Lamont fulfills his promise,” he said. “But I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Connecticut political icon Ralph Nader, who has run many highprofile, third-party national campaigns for office, does not think Democrats in the state will ever follow through.
“They’ve been opposing it for 30 years, the Democrats, because they lose the scapegoat,” he said. “Whenever they lose, they don’t look at themselves in the mirror and say, ‘What can we learn from our past failure?’ They look for scapegoats. Because we know that if they did ranked voting that would solve the problem.”
Stephanie Thomas, the newly elected secretary of the state, said during a debate that it’s not the right time for ranked choice voting, although Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, herself a former secretary of the state, has endorsed the idea. “I think it brings civility to the campaign process,” she said.
Minor parties in the state support the idea. Justin Paglino, who ran unsuccessfully for the 3rd Congressional District on the Green Party ticket against Rosa DeLauro, made it the centerpiece of his campaign.
“There’s a lot of voters who might vote under the rank choice system for the independent candidate and then, as their second choice, vote for one of the major parties. So, the major parties have something to gain from rank choice voting,” Paglino said.
This year was a tough one for the state’s third parties. Krayeske was the Green Party’s only statewide candidate, and having failed to garner more than 1 percent of the total vote, the party now loses its status as a minor party.
Independent Party candidate Rob Hotaling, who ran against Lamont and Stefanowski, also failed to garner 1 percent of the vote, which means his party loses its gubernatorial ballot line.
The only exception was the Working Families Party, which seldom, if ever, runs its own statewide candidates, choosing instead a strategy of “fusion voting,” or crossendorsing Democrats.
Nonetheless, the party does support ranked choice.
“We will have to change the strategy because once the situation has changed, the strategy changes,” said Roger Senserrich, communications and policy director for Connecticut’s branch of the Working Families Party. “What we believe, as well, is that the more say voters have, the better. And ranked choice voting — it’s better than fusion voting.”
Fusion voting has been an effective strategy for the WFP and for Democratic candidates. Those WFP votes have made the difference between success and failure: It’s wonderful and we like it and we support it and we have been very effective using it,” Senserrich said.
But ranked choice voting means that there can be more choice “without fear of playing spoiler, because ranked choice means that no votes will get wasted,” he said.
Arguments against ranked choice
When asked if Republicans in Connecticut might support ranked choice voting, state GOP Chairman Ben Proto raised objections, the first of which was feasibility. It may not be a simple procedure.
“You may have a constitutional issue in regards to how we elect people in the state of Connecticut,” he said, and he’s probably right. Ranked choice requires a majority vote, not just a plurality. A candidate needs to get more than 50 percent of the vote to win.
But our state Constitution specifies that candidates need “to have received the greatest number of votes,” so if one candidate gets 40 percent of the votes cast, they still would win as long as they exceeded the total of their closest competitor.
“So that would require a constitutional amendment to do ranked choice voting,” Proto said.
That’s not out of the realm of possibility. Voters this year decided in favor of amending the state Constitution to allow for early voting, but it’s not as simple as a bill proposed, passed and signed.
The second issue is whether or not it would actually help thirdparty candidates get more traction at the polls. Candidates in Connecticut are routinely cross-endorsed. So, under a ranked choice system, could a voter choose candidate A on the Democratic line as their first choice and the same candidate on a third-party ballot line as their second choice?
That, Proto said, would result in less choice, not more. It might work, he said, “If you said you can only be on one line,” though “at that point I think you violated the U.S. Constitution and the state Constitution on freedom of association.”
While Proto is not a proponent of ranked choice voting, he does see room for change.
“There are election laws on our books that we wrote 60 years ago that are still in there that were designed for a two-party system,” he said, though he’s also not for changing the state Constitution willy-nilly. “Why do we want to keep amending the Constitution? It’s a pretty good document. It worked pretty well for about 300and-some-odd years in Connecticut.”