Ranked choice voting has promise, but won’t improve rank choices

• Michael Kooi

Michael Kooi

Talk about it

In this election year where nobody seems happy with their choices, I can’t help but think of the movie, “Brewster’s Millions.” In it, Richard Pryor’s character mounts a campaign to elect “none of the above” for president.

It sounds far-fetched — until you consider how well NOTA might do in a Duluth School Board election.

NOTA likely won’t appear on any Duluth ballots soon, but ranked choice voting, or RCV, might. A City Council Committee of the Whole will take up the matter on Monday, Feb. 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the council chambers.

For the uninitiated, RCV requires voters to rank the candidates for an office in order of preference — as opposed to picking just one. The ballots are then run through a series of tabulations, eliminations and re-tabulations — based on those preferences — until one candidate emerges with a majority count based on combined first-, second-, and third-choice votes.

So why make this change? Advocates of RCV argue that the current system rewards doctrinaire, ideologically rigid candidates that toss the most raw meat to the base during the primary and then backpedal to pick up just enough independents. Throw in a third party candidate and you don’t even need a majority to win.

With RCV, in contrast, a consensus-oriented candidate who can gain at least some level of preference from a majority of the electorate should outperform a polarizing candidate with far less than majority support. This actually aligns the skills for winning elections with the skills required for effective governance.

Opponents assert that RCV violates the concept of “one person, one vote.” That oversimplifies the issue. Each voter already casts multiple votes on a single ballot across the various offices at stake, and casts two votes for each office if he votes in the primary and the general election. RCV merely aims to compact this process into one election.

RCV advocates also point to the potential cost savings of eliminating primaries, but price shouldn’t be a factor. Either RCV better reflects the will of the electorate or it doesn’t.

If we can find conclusive evidence that it does, then Duluth should adopt it — even if it costs twice as much. That’s what this business in the Constitution about forming “a more perfect union” is all about. Anything less is democracy on the cheap, and we all know that you get what you pay for.

That said, RCV doesn’t address every issue in our current system. For example, ranked choice can’t improve a set of rank choices. (See the Republican presidential primary field.) You still need highly qualified candidates who are committed to serving all of their constituents — not just the interest groups who donated to their campaigns.

Speaking of which, in a system where money basically equals speech, the biggest spenders can still drown out the competition to ensure they are top-of-mind in the voting booth.

Of course, we voters can counteract that effect by researching all of the candidates thoroughly, evaluat-

ing their arguments, and voting with our heads instead of our hearts, guts or any other body parts we tend to think with. But in many cases, you’ll have to evaluate five or six candidates or more at once — and for each office — instead of just two or three. Frankly, I’m not convinced that most people even do the latter.

Which brings me to the bottom line: Even with RCV, we’ll still get out of our elections only what we put into them. If we want better results, then we need to make better choices — be they ranked or not.

Michael Kooi is a freelance writer and resident of Duluth’s East Hillside neighborhood. He writes about Duluth at dulu-sions.areavoices.com.

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