Just Politics

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Too many Democrats are running for president in 2020. But there's an easy fix

None of the four top Democratic candidates poll consistently above 30% – ranked-choice voting, however, can determine who people actually support

David Daley

Wed 27 Nov 2019 06.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 27 Nov 2019 06.22 EST

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These long campaigns serve one purpose: determining the presidential nominee an entire party can support. If four, or even five, candidates last all the way to the convention, the nominee might still be struggling to get above 30%. That’s a recipe for dangerous division, the same kind that plagued Republicans in 2016 when a large field also led to a plurality winner.

There is, however, a common-sense solution to this. Our political parties should continue to embrace ranked choice voting (RCV) in their nominating contests. RCV has become one of the most popular political reforms in the nation (adopted by voters in Maine, New York City and a growing number of smaller cities and towns) for this exact reason: it helps avoid plurality winners and determines the person who most people actually support. It’s built to pull consensus out of chaos like this.

RCV functions like an instant runoff. Suppose the choices narrowed down to Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren. The candidate in fifth place is eliminated. His or her supporters select their second choice. That process continues until someone crosses 50% and wins.

If done nationally, the nominee would be the candidate who combines the ability to earn broad support with the largest and most passionate base. The supporters of losing candidates might not like the outcome, but Democrats would leave Milwaukee knowing it was fair and reflected popular opinion. The winner would have legitimacy; no one could claim the process had been rigged.

Democrats in five states this cycle will cast RCV ballots to make more votes count in their presidential primaries. But even without RCV in place everywhere, pollsters could use it to do a better job of accurately capturing public opinion. Surveys that show several candidates bunched together, all of them within the margin of error, actually do very little even to provide an accurate snapshot of a race compared to using rankings to simulate an “instant runoff”.

The five ways Republicans will crack down on voting rights in 2020
Carol Anderson
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/13/voter-suppression-2020-democracy-america

Here’s the simple truth. Today’s nominating process is fundamentally not equipped to determine a fair winner from today’s giant candidate fields, filled with both self-funding billionaires and leaders with passionate small-donor bases. This could be the year that this archaic machinery is completely overwhelmed, just as it nearly was for Republicans in 2016.

If that breakdown does not come this year, it will almost certainly occur in 2024, when at least one party, and quite possibly both, could hold nominating contests with even more candidates. A choice between two plurality winners will only exacerbate polarization and divides in the country. It shouldn’t be possible to have nominees – or winners – that a majority of the public opposes.

We’re voting the wrong way,...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/27/democratic-presidential-candidates-ranked-choice-voting

In the future more Americans will be given a better way to vote.

Ranked Choice Voting and Australia's Upcoming Elections: A Primer

Andrew Douglas
August 30, 2013

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Ranked choice voting was implemented in Australia in order to prevent the vote splitting inherent in first-past-the-post elections. The need for such as system became apparent to conservatives in the late 1910s after the emergence of the Country Party (now the National Party of Australia) and the Nationalist Party split the conservative vote. The existence of two major conservative parties put conservatives at an electoral disadvantage to those on the left, who were relatively more united behind the Labor Party

https://www.fairvote.org/ranked-choice-voting-and-australia-s-upcoming-elections-a-primer