Against Runoff Elections

Y esterday in Georgia, former running back Herschel Walker got tackled by the conventional wisdom. Most political observers predicted that Walker would lose to incumbent senator Raphael Warnock in the state’s runoff election, and that’s exactly what happened. Walker was a bad candidate from the start, and his apologists’ prevarications couldn’t hide it, as much as they tried. He is a morally corrupt figure who frequently falls prey to his gaffes and missteps. Walker’s close association with former president Donald Trump, who recruited him to run for this race, didn’t help either.

Walker’s myriad personal and political shortcomings have garnered considerable news coverage. As engrossing as that may be, there’s something else about this race that’s gotten comparatively little attention: the flawed nature of the runoff system itself.

To be clear, Donald Trump, Stacey Abrams, and Joe Biden are wrong about elections in Georgia. This is no “Jim Crow 2.0.” Peach State elections are, in fact, free and fair, and Warnock is the legitimate winner of this race. But runoff electoral systems are nonetheless rife with deficiencies, and states would be wise to dispense with them.

Two states, Georgia and Louisiana, use what political scientists call a two-round system in general elections. Under the system, if no candidate receives over half the votes cast in the first round, the election proceeds to a second round in which only the top two candidates from the first round are on the ballot. Proponents of this system extol its majoritarian virtues, highlighting the way it ensures that the victor’s win is legitimated by the support of an absolute majority of voters.

Why did only Georgia and Louisiana adopt this system? Well, given these two states’ segregationist past, it should come as a surprise to no one that this originally was done to dilute the black vote, by requiring the winning candidate to receive a majority in a multi-candidate race in a place where African Americans are a minority of the voters. Of course, an institution’s racist origins aren’t necessarily an indictment of its modern-day legitimacy if it no longer exists to disenfranchise black people. But history aside, the two-round system is bad on the merits.

For starters, the absolute majority that the runoff system yields is artificial. Ranked-choice-voting systems produce a victor with an absolute majority that reflects the entirety of the candidate field in much less time and at a lower cost. That’s not to say that ranked-choice is perfect. It has its fair share of problems, but it’s superior to the two-round system.

The runoff system also carries its own set of assumptions. Why is a candidate’s election through a runoff inherently more legitimate than a win through plurality-voting systems such as first-past-the-post? A candidate who beats out all the other candidates in a field is worthy of elected office, irrespective of whether he made it past an arbitrary threshold. Proponents of runoffs have failed to explain why 50 percent is the magic number that engenders legitimacy. Who’s to say it’s not 66 percent, 75 percent, or 100 percent, for that matter?

And perhaps most dubiously, supporters of runoff systems rest on the assumption that elected officials must always be the choice of a majority of voters. Why is that the case? This mobocratic approach to politics is precisely what Edmund Burke and the Framers of the Constitution rejected. Majority support isn’t the only path to political legitimacy. Nothing improper occurs if a candidate gets elected through a simple plurality. This is just democracy at work.

First-past-the-post is easier for a politically unengaged electorate to understand and can be processed more seamlessly than preferential-voting systems, good qualities to have at a time when the counting of ballots has become politicized. Republicans control Georgia’s state government and have already made other positive changes to the electoral system. Why not ditch this racist relic?