What Ranked-Choice Voting is really about

Our latest PR tells people that with ranked choice voting they can just vote us out if they want to …

Lately you’ve been seeing lots of letters-to-the-editor and politicians saying that Ranked Choice Voting will:

• give voters more choices;

• free us from our two-party hegemony;

• improve voter turnout;

• reduce political extremism.

This is all preposterous, but it’s the kind of claptrap that wins people over. If you’re clever enough to smell the rotten fish here but aren’t sure where the stench is coming from, read on.

To understand the real motivation behind RCV, you must understand how RCV will change the effect that third parties have on elections.

The idea of escaping our two-party system is utterly laughable, and the people selling you RCV know this perfectly well. So when career politicians from your local dominant party smile and tell you that they’re changing your elections in order to give you more choices, you know that they’re not expecting you to spend much time thinking about it.

THIRD PARTIES UNDER OUR CURRENT SYSTEM

Under our current system, where you vote for only one competing candidate and the person who gets the most votes wins, third parties take votes away from their most closely aligned major parties. Thus, voting for a third party is correctly derided as “throwing your vote away.” Examples:

• In national elections we have a Libertarian Party that perennially runs a candidate for president. Two or three percent of our electorate consists of people who fancy themselves libertarians, i.e., “conservative” purists who are too philosophically lofty to vote for Republicans. So they vote for the Libertarian as a matter of principle, and they end up effectively electing their nemesis (i.e. the Democrat). E.g., in the 2016 presidential election, Libertarian Gary Johnson probably cost Trump about 3% of the vote.
  

• In Minnesota and some other states there is a Legal Marijuana Now (LMN) party. In Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the LMN party can take as much as 10% of the vote away from a U.S. House candidate like Ilhan Omar. In her district Omar is so dominant that she can afford the loss, but one can never be too sure about such things.

So, third parties work against the two major parties by stealing votes from their ideologically similar superiors. Libertarians take votes from Republicans. Green Party and legal-dope parties take votes from Democrats.

Now it’s possible that Libertarians wouldn’t even show up to vote for Republicans, and dope heads might not bother awakening from their stupors to vote for Democrats, in which case third parties actually have no effect on major party tallies. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know the extent of this.

THIRD PARTIES UNDER RCV

RCV flips the effects of third parties. A Libertarian is likely to choose a Republican as his second choice, and a pothead is likely to select a Democrat for that same honor. Under RCV, instead of Libertarians simply removing Republican votes, they have the option of effectively voting Republican, and Legal Marijuana Now voters have the option of effectively voting Democrat.

So RCV will strengthen, not diminish, the stranglehold that the two major parties have over U.S. elections. Under our current system Republicans are not likely to get ideologically pure Libertarians to vote for them (over the Libertarian candidate), just as Democrats are unlikely to sway potheads from voting for Legal Marijuana Now where LMN is available. But under RCV it’s easy to imagine both parties convincing single-issue voters and other die-hards to at least add a major-party candidate as an alternate.

UTTER CLUTTER

There’s another incentive here, which is for the two major parties to create third parties to attract single-issue voters who would not otherwise show up to vote. A party that has the resources to create and operate faux third parties will probably do so. In any given area, the more dominant major party will have the greater resources, and so RCV will have the effect of strengthening the major party that is already dominant.

You might say that the parties could do something similar already, just in the opposite direction. For example, Republicans could create a faux socialist party to steal votes from Democrats, and Democrats could create a faux pro-life party to abscond with Republican votes. But creating ideologically opposite parties seems more prone to failure and discovery.

If you think it’s far-fetched that major parties could create faux third parties that actually qualify to get on the ballot, consider that in the 2020 presidential election there were apparently 34 third-party candidates, including Ricki Sue King of the Know Your Family Genealogy Party and Gary Zwing of the Boiling Frog Party. Four of those 34 garnered under 200 votes each nationwide. Probably all 34 had far fewer resources with which to litter our political landscape than does either major party.

AND THE WINNER IS …

All of this is the opposite of what you’re being told. RCV is being pushed by the big money that’s already behind the two big parties. With the exception of the very few special elections in which there are no primaries (e.g., the 2022 Alaskan special election to replace a deceased house member, where two Republicans were on the general election ballot), elections will go like this:

• The parties will hold their primaries.

• One candidate from each major party will be on the ballot.

• Third parties will also still each have one candidate on the ballot.

• One of the two major-party candidates will still win.

The only difference is that each third party will now assist, rather than detract from, the major-party candidate with whom its voters are most closely aligned. So forget all the RCV propaganda. Major-party politicians who tell you to adopt RCV are doing so because they fully understand that RCV will solidify their already-solid positions in upcoming elections.

Believe otherwise if you wish. You’re free to believe in the Tooth Fairy too. I’m afraid I can’t stop you.

==== ADDENDUM of 11/4/23

Well it’s election season, and in my neighboring town on Minnetonka (Minnesota) somebody shoved Ranked Choice Voting down the throats of the local populace back in 2020, and somebody else has now managed to get an RCV recall on the ballot this year. Ever since the “recall” ballot measure was approved back in August, I’ve been seeing some version of this ad on essentially every news site that I browse:

This ad is ubiquitous. It’s easily the most frequent ad I see on my favorite news sites, almost all of which are “conservative.” When the ad first started appearing, I thought that someone must be spending tens of thousands of dollars running it. Now I’m pretty sure it’s in the hundreds of thousands - all to prevent the citizens of one town in Minnesota from repealing RCV.

If we read the fine print, we see that the organization behind this incredible expenditure is fairvotemn.org (“Fair Vote MN”), whose web site at this writing makes it extremely clear that RCV is its #1 priority. In addition to the omnipresent static ad above, Fair Vote MN has produced various YouTube videos that it also places as ads in the media, no doubt at great expense. This is not some bunch of Minnetonka residents posting impassioned pleas on their smartphone cameras: this is 100% professionally produced political propaganda.

How ironic that Fair Vote MN’s video spots are designed to convey the impression that this “vote no” message is a heartfelt grass-roots movement - just a bunch of local Minnetonka folks sitting around their front porches, drinking their coffee, and honestly expressing their feelings on an issue that seems to be of vast importance to them. You know, a topic that they spend most of their waking moments worrying about. Just like you do. Yup. Sure.

I will leave it to you to discern the political leanings of Fair Vote MN and to determine who might be behind its apparently vast funding. Suffice it to say that according to Fair Vote MN itself, the organization has been working toward this for a long time. Among its other objectives are:

• majority rule and

• proportional representation.

If you understand anything about our U.S. Constitution (along with the constitutions of most states), you’ll know that majority rule and proportional representation are anathema to our most fundamental American principles:

• Under “majority rule,” the majority gets to implement whatever it wants. If someone with enough money can convince an ignorant majority to vote for some policy (e.g. to implement or retain RCV), then that policy gets implemented. The problem comes when the majority votes for something unconstitutional - say, for example, to divest you of all your personal property and hand it over to the state, or perhaps to have you executed as an enemy of the state, even though you have committed no crime. Majority rule is ultimately about the abolition of all of our constitutional rights and liberties. If the majority can simply upend the Constitution by voting away its provisions via a simple majority vote, then there is essentially no Constitution.
  

• Under “proportional representation” there would be no U.S. Senate, in which states get an equal say regardless of state populations, nor would there be any similar legislative bodies at lower levels. This would essentially end the ability of the states to uphold their own individual characteristics and thus to function as havens for people with preferences different from those of the majority.

Or, to put it another way, with majority rule and proportional representation, the tyranny of the majority would be utterly unopposed. Suffice it to say that after a few years of RCV, majority rule, and proportional representation, the USA will more resemble Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and the modern Chinese Communist Party than the USA that we know today. Which, I presume, is the actual mission of “Fair Vote MN.”