The American people have just fired Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In their place is our new boss, Donald Trump. Whether or not you support Trump or Harris, we know our election system is faulty.
The two party system we have now is simple, but ineffective. Voters’ voices aren’t heard as loudly as they would be with a different voting structure. The solution to many of our election problems is to adopt Ranked Choice Voting, which will help increase diversity in candidates and parties running, in turn allowing voters to pick the candidate that most aligns with their values.
RCV is where voters rank their candidates in order of preference rather than only being able to choose one. If your top candidate receives the least amount of total votes, your vote will then be passed on to your second favorite candidate, and then your third and so on. This allows more parties to have a chance of winning
To put this into a real-life example, if you voted for Jill Stein, a Green Party candidate, as first preference and Kamala Harris as your second preference, as Stein received fewer votes than the other two candidates, your vote would transfer to Harris. In our current system, you would be practically throwing away your vote if you voted for Stein, as 628,129 other voters did in this year’s election according to newsstation.com.
For as long as most of us can remember, voters have only had the choice between two candidates despite there often being multiple independent candidates. It was no different in this year’s election where the two choices that could affect the election were Trump or Harris. The reason for this weird phenomenon is called the spoiler effect.
This occurs when a third-party candidate “spoils” a major candidate simply by participating. When people vote for a third-party candidate whose values are similar to those of a major party candidate (of the Democratic or Republican Party) this happens. Because the third-party candidate will likely lose, voting for the third party instead of the major party will decrease the majority party’s chance of success, therefore allowing the opposition to win.
By voting for a spoiler candidate you are essentially stealing the vote from a stronger candidate, causing their chances to dwindle.
This is the main reason why it’s impossible for third party candidates to gain a significant following, as voting for a spoiler candidate would take votes away from one of the two parties, causing the other one to win. The last time the spoiler effect was seen on a large scale was in 1968.
According to 270 To Win, the last time a non-Democratic or non-Republican candidate won any electoral votes was in Richard Nixon’s first term. Back then, George C. Wallace, a member of the American Independent Party, accumulated 46 electoral votes across five Southern states, his main reason for support being his opposing views on desegregating the South. Wallace had run as a Democratic nominee three times before moving to his new party.
In the election that year, fewer than half of the votes cast were for Nixon and the Republican party. It’s undemocratic that someone with so little of the country’s votes could be put into office.
According to 270 To Win, if RCV were in place, Hubert H. Humphrey would have won with a strong majority. Instead, we used the two-party system and the less supported candidate won.
In addition, RCV reduces polarization, according to Karsen Wahal, a senior at Stanford University studying math and economics who co-authored a 38-page game theory paper on RCV.
“Voting [using RCV] tends to select winners of elections that are more moderate than the current system,” Wahal said.
If extreme candidates win, more people will be dissatisfied. RCV combats this by electing more moderate candidates.
In addition to giving voices to voters and reducing polarization, RCV can reduce or fully eliminate dirty politics.
Our current system encourages negative campaigning. All you have to do is beat the other candidate, you don’t need a majority vote. Candidates in an RCV system would have to appeal to all voters. RCV could minimize these side effects. It is seen all over the country and one such place is right in our backyard.
The race for California’s 16th Congressional District is an example of mudslinging. In this past election, Sam Liccardo and Evan Low ran to replace former congresswoman Anna Eshoo in a top-two election system. During the election, when I turned on practically every local channel, both sides were slandering each other with allegations and insults during the ad breaks.
Low, who lost the race to Liccardo, has championed Assembly Bill 1227 that promotes RCV. The bill would allow RCV to be adopted in Santa Clara County.
“In our current system, everyone is attacking each other,” Low told Verde. “I don’t want to do that, that’s not me.”
According to Low, the implementation of RCV in places such as San Francisco has decreased mudslinging.
“[With] RCV in San Francisco, people are not throwing mud at each other as much because they want the second-place vote,” Low said.
For national elections which include the presidential election, states decide the laws and voting system.
Currently, all states use the popular vote results from the general election to decide which political party chooses the individuals who are appointed. States can decide if they want to change this system and they could theoretically change it to a RCV-based system. There are no federal laws that disallow RCV.
However, RCV still has its downsides. As of June, 10 states have outlawed the use of RCV. A movement at the forefront of the push is Save Our States. They focus on defending the constitutional power of the states and helping them use that power to defend our republic. Harry Roth, the director of outreach for Save our States, advocates banning RCV for various reasons, one of them being ballot exhaustion.
“For a lot of people, either they don’t know enough about it [RCV] so they won’t rank enough candidates, so that ballot gets eliminated, or just based on principle, you may not want to rank a few people because you don’t want any of those people to win,” Roth told Verde.
This argument says that if people don’t rank candidates, there is no change to the system. RCV offers voters the opportunity to choose multiple, but doesn’t penalize if you only pick one. In addition, if RCV is implemented its usage will be normalized and in turn voters will become more familiar with it.
Roth also said that there were technological issues with auditing in regards to counting votes.
“Alameda County, where Oakland is, had a local school board race … and they announced the wrong winner because of a glitch in the RCV system,” Roth said. “And it’s so difficult to audit — it took months for them to figure out who the actual winner was.”
Auditing issues have happened in the past and it is true that RCV may complicate the voting process. I believe that with more awareness of the subject and technological improvements will solve these issues in the future and it can become a part of our current system.
Changing a system that has been set in stone for hundreds of years may seem impossible.
The reality is, RCV is not a foreign concept to the U.S. According to the RCV Resource Center, there have been 62 jurisdictions where RCV has been adopted, including San Francisco where they have used it in all city elecitons.
Every city and county should be following San Francisco’s example.
What say you, Palo Alto?