Ranked Choice Voting: Bad idea whose time has come

London Breed

Nate Cohn writes about New York City's mayoral race and Ranked Choice Voting:

It’s the kind of race that might test one of the major risks of ranked-choice voting: a phenomenon known as ballot exhaustion. A ballot is said to be “exhausted” when every candidate ranked by a voter has been eliminated and that ballot thus no longer factors into the election....But the risk of ballot exhaustion is an underappreciated reason that ranked-choice voting doesn’t always realize its purported advantages.

San Jose's Bruce Sears responds in a comment:

What are you talking about, Nate? Exhausted ballots? Who cares? As an RCV voter, I could just mark the ballot as I would in a single choice voting system. Then if my one choice loses, it is no different than losing in the bad-old-days non-RCV vote. RCV doesn't demand you throw away your vote to support one candidate. If you like 3 of them, give them all a better chance of winning. So not amazing. Good grief.

Cohn apparently thinks voters are obligated to play by the "progressive" RCV rules to rank all the candidates. Otherwise, their ballots are "exhausted," aka "wasted."

That's what happened before RCV when a voter's preferred candidate lost, but it was just called "losing," not "exhausted." Cohn and supporters of the RCV system apparently think that every candidate is worthy of consideration, which of course is not what voters think.

Like me, they think some candidates are so unacceptable they won't even try to fit them in under that assumption. That means my ballot in local elections is often quickly "exhausted," since I refuse to pretend that all candidates are worth ranking. 

That's okay with me, since it happens to every voter: you vote for a candidate and he/she wins or loses and life goes on.

Cohn does understand how RCV works:

If no candidate receives a majority of first preference votes, the race is decided by an instant runoff: The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and the votes of those who preferred the eliminated candidate will be transferred to those voters’ second choices. The process continues until one candidate wins a majority of the remaining ballots.

The key term here is "remaining ballots," which are a fraction of the number of ballots originally cast. Hence, London Breed was elected Mayor of San Francisco with a small minority of the votes.

Cohn refers to what he thinks are regrettable outcomes in San Francisco elections in 2011 and 2018:

In the 2011 San Francisco mayoral race, 27 percent of ballots did not rank either of the two candidates who reached the final round....Even a smaller percentage of exhausted ballots can be decisive in a close race. One analogous case is the special mayoral election in San Francisco in 2018, when London Breed narrowly prevailed by one percentage point. In that race, 9 percent of ballots didn’t rank either Ms. Breed or the runner-up, Mark Leno.

I remember the 2011 election. I voted for Jeff Adachi all three times, which Cohn thinks was the wrong way to do it. (See Ranked Choice Voting: Another prog fiasco from 2011, including an important exchange in the comments.)

But there were 16 candidates in that election and researching all 16 of them was of course not an option for even the best-informed voter. And I was better informed than most, since this blog is about, among other things, San Francisco politics.

I did know something about Adachi, since he was the city's elected Public Defender. I also knew something about Ed Lee, David Chiu, John Avalos, Dennis Herrera and other leading candidates, and I didn't like them. (You can click on their names below to see why).

It turned out that Adachi survived the grotesque RCV elimination system for 16 rounds before he was eliminated. Were my three votes for him wasted? Only if you think that voting for a losing candidate is by definition wasteful. If he had even been eliminated immediately, voting for him was still my only preference.

More from Cohn:

"The number of exhausted ballots tends to be highest in wide-open races, in which voters have the least clarity about the likely final matchup."

Cohn here reveals his front-runner bias, since his assumption is that a pragmatic voter---who hates the idea of "wasting" the vote---is going to know what the "final matchup" is likely to be and will vote accordingly! 

As I pointed out in one of my many critical posts on RCV, this system is a historical spin-off of the self-esteem movement. Every candidate doesn't get a trophy---that is, victory---but every candidate supposedly deserves respectful consideration.

See Ranked Choice Voting: Another prog fiasco, Ranked Choice Voting: The illusion of choice and RCV and the illusion of choice 3.