Tinkerers with the American election system have touted ranked-choice voting as a cure for our ills. It could play a starring role in the fight for the Senate this year, as it is used in Maine and Alaska, two states with embattled Republican incumbents. Alaskans are also being asked, in Ballot Measure 2, whether to repeal their state’s unique system, which combines ranked-choice voting with a top-four jungle-primary system. They would be wise to do so. The use of ranked-choice voting in general elections is a bad idea at odds with American tradition.
Few things are more important to the long-term health of a democracy than public acceptance of the legitimacy of election outcomes. That value is all the more important in an age of deeply polarized voters. Despite a series of blows to public confidence in our system over the past few decades, American voters still mostly accept that it works as designed: The candidate who gets the most votes wins. That’s been one of the few constants in American elections since the Founding. Indeed, this is a sufficiently simple and powerful argument that it has sometimes been wielded against our systems of presidential and congressional elections, in which the national popular vote would sometimes deliver different outcomes from the results of individual state and district popular votes.
Under a ranked-choice system, however, the candidate who is the first choice of the most voters can still lose. That is, in fact, the entire point of the system.
The immediate problem with ranked-choice voting is that it makes elections more complicated, less transparent, and slower to resolve. All of these things are bad for public acceptance of the results. Because first-place votes must be counted before the ranking of second and further choices can begin, this can leave the public in the dark well after the election — especially in a state such as Alaska where the speed of counting is already hampered by the long distances that ballots must travel from remote parts of the state. Untangling how a particular final result was reached is an exercise in math that challenges political professionals, let alone ordinary voters.
Alaska’s combination with a jungle-primary system, which ensures multiple candidates, produces its own mischief, such as this election’s recruitment by Democrats of a fake candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent. The lack of a clear party line for the winner of each party’s primary makes such schemes easier.
The promise of ranked-choice voting is that it will encourage more moderate candidates acceptable to larger numbers of voters, rather than those who drive support among an energized minority. A potential drawback, particularly in multi-candidate fields, is that it can serve as a barrier to electing racial minorities. But even aside from that, even if it works as intended, the system is apt to produce something that looks more like a European system, with the election of candidates who are weakly tied to a majority party and can extract concessions as a price of joining coalitions. In Alaska, much of the point of the current system is to entrench Lisa Murkowski even if she loses another Republican primary. But that is against the spirit and history of our two-party system, which produces coalitions that learn to work with one another, rather than ad hoc governments of convenience.
For conservatives and right-populists alike, of course, the ability to govern through one of the two major parties has been a blessing. Whatever our discontents with the trends in recent Republican primaries, the party is more responsive to actual voter sentiment than are many European systems, where elite negotiation of coalitions tends to marginalize issues of concern to right-leaning voters.
We like our good old American system better. Making it more complicated is unnecessary and dangerous to trust in an already-threatened pillar of our republic. Just let the most votes win.