[EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary

Fri Jun 22 09:37:51 PDT 2018

Giving voters the option of full ranking could be used to approximate Condorcet voting, right? Could that make a difference? Would it be desirable? I suppose it would be impossible to explain to voters who do not have time to focus on voting methods.

(List members probably already know this. In case some don’t, the Condorcet method relies on head-to-head contests among all candidates, so that all votes count, to the extent voters wish to express their preferences. A candidate who defeats all others in head-to-head contests is the Condorcet winner, so that no runoff is needed. Voters who do not rank a candidate are treated as having voted for the candidates they did rank over the ones they didn’t, in head-to-head contests between those candidates. It can result in a cycle that has to be broken in some way — A beats B who beats C who beats A — so that there is no Condorcet winner, but that is rare and hasn’t happened in my experience. I gather that the votes in head-to-head contests can be derived accurately from the rankings made by each voter, unless the voter has unusual preferences.)

Mark

Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law

Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
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From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> on behalf of Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org>
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2018 8:40:01 AM
To: Eric McGhee
Cc: Election Law Listserv
Subject: Re: [EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary

Someone could propose it ,but it's not done anywhere that I know of (both many international uses and the thousands of NGO uses out there.

To me the idea represents a misunderstanding of what happens inmost  runoffs and why voters may choose to abstain. OF course if you don't want to allow abstention, you can mandate rankings as done in most Australian elections. That mandate is the most unpopular feature of the RCV system there, btw, which is celebrating a century of use later this yea at the national level.

Rob

On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 11:33 AM, Eric McGhee <mcghee at ppic.org<mailto:mcghee at ppic.org>> wrote:
Rob and Vlad, has anyone ever proposed a runoff between the top two candidates if the number of exhausted ballots is large enough to matter?  Kind of like the "runoff only if nobody >50%" rule in a more traditional first-past-the-post system.

Eric McGhee
Research Fellow

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From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu>> on behalf of Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org<mailto:rr at fairvote.org>>
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2018 8:18 AM
To: Kogan, Vladimir
Cc: Election Law Listserv
Subject: Re: [EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary

Thanks for inviting me to respond, Vlad. Just enjoyed being in a forum with your "ballot exhaustion" coauthor Craig Burnett, by the way, and I welcome folks on the list joining me at 9 am Monday morning at Third Way in DC <https://www.thirdway.org/events/ranked-choice-voting-lessons-from-the-states> for a conversation about RCV in the states with Third Way's Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and FairVote New Mexico's Maria Perez, who will talk both about Santa Fe's first use of RCV in March and the unanimous vote of the council in the state's 2nd largest city Las Cruces to use RCV next year.

As you might suspect, I don't see Vlad's numbers as a problem - indeed, quite the opposite. A few reasons why:

* Turnout: More Maine Democrats came out to vote for governor than any previous gubernatorial primary. That follows a string of mayoral elections with ranked choice voting where turnout was a good bit higher<http://www.fairvote.org/the_facts_of_ranked_choice_voting_voters_like_it_high_turnouts_are_trending> than projected: San Francisco (2nd most mayoral votes ever, this month and a lot more votes cast  for mayor with RCV than top of the ballot for governor and US Senator without RCV), Santa Fe, St. Paul and Minneapolis. We can safely put the "RCV will turn voters off" claim to rest. But that higher turnout almost certainly does mean some voters are coming out primarily to back candidates who doesn't reach the final instant runoff. (2 additional notable facts from San Francisco: voters were six times more likely to invalidate their vote for governor with an overvote than invalidate their vote for mayor with an overvote, while 95% of backers of the Asian American candidate Jane Kim who did particular well with API voters ranked at least one other candidate 2nd.)

* Contrast with runoffs and plurality:  Of the Maine Democrats who had their ballot count in the first round (final numbers aren't in, but will be in 126,000 range), 93% had their ballot count for one of the two finalists after five candidates were defeated in the RCV tally. That "exhaustion" compares quite well to the average of federal primary runoffs drawing 62% of first round voters <http://www.fairvote.org/federal_primary_runoff_elections_2016> back to the polls. We did an overall analysis comparing "exhausted votes" with RCV vs. "exhausted voters" in runoffs <http://www.fairvote.org/ranked_choice_voting_outperforms_runoffs_in_upholding_majority_rule> last winter that will look at better for RCV when we update it this summer. And of course the fact that of four out of every five backers of defeated candidates were able to express a preference that counted in the final round is a lot better than a single-choice plurality system that would have allowed the winner to take the nomination with 33% of the first round vote.

* Deeper significance of RCV beyond the "binary choice" analysis: It's misleading with RCV to determine an RCV winner's mandate only by their final round "instant runoff" percentage. What that percentage misses is that the winner has often worked hard to be ranked by backers of the candidate who finishes second, In San Francisco, for example, voters this year were still limited to ranking three candidate in the 8-candidate election for mayor. (That limit will be lifted next year, btw.) The winner London Breed was ranked 2nd or 3rd by nearly half of the backers of her finalist opponent Mark Leno and was ranked in the top three by 63% of all voters. That's not just of theoretical value. Leno easily could have finished third behind Jane KIm and missed the final instant runoff, so Breed wanted to connect with his voters. Indeed, she was ranked 2nd or third by more than a fifth of the backers of all other 7 candidates, including the most liberal and conservative candidates.

* Getting the runoff candidates right: Furthermore, RCV is more reliable than runoffs for ensuring that the final two candidates are representative of voter opinions The Top 2 primary in California this year ultimately didn't shut out Democrats from winnable congressional districts this November, but Democratic forces had to literally spend millions of dollars to ensure that didn't happen. Without that kind of intervention, that "shut out" in fact did happen to Republicans in a special state senate election in Georgia last year in a GOP-leaning district and to Democrats in a statewide race for state treasurer in 2016. I know some mathematicians can have their concerns about RCV in this area too, but RCV certainly is more reliable than runoffs for ending up with the two strongest candidates in the final round.

Thanks again for the invite, Vlad, and happy to take this offline to not bore the list.
Rob Richie, FairVote

On Thursday, June 21, 2018, Kogan, Vladimir <kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu><mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>>> wrote:
Regarding this:

“Ranked-Choice Voting Fans Hope Maine’s Experiment Pays Off”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99722>
Posted on June 21, 2018 6:25 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99722> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP:<https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maine/articles/2018-06-21/ranked-choice-fans-hope-maines-experiment-pays-off>

 Maine<https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maine>‘s first crack at ranked-choice voting went off without a hitch, and backers of the voting method are hopeful the results will motivate other states to give it a try.

The state finished its first ranked-choice process Wednesday when it named the winners of Democratic primaries for governor and the 2nd Congressional District.
Does anyone know where to find the actual RCV results in Maine? From what has been reported, it looks like there was considerable ballot “exhaustion,” at least in the Democratic primary for governor, something that seems endemic<http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/files/2014/12/ElectoralStudies-2fupfhd.pdf> to RCV.

It looks like the AP stopped updating the election night results, but the latest<https://www.politico.com/election-results/2018/maine/> first-round totals I could find show a total of 120,406 votes cast in the Democratic primary when 90.2% percent of precincts were reporting. By contrast, the RCV results<https://www.pressherald.com/2018/06/12/june-2018-maine-election-results/> reported in the press show only 116,431 votes counted after the final round of redistribution. That means a minimum of 4,000 ballots were exhausted (and probably a lot more, since there is still the 9.8% of precincts not included in the most  recent first-round AP count, plus any provisional ballots that were counted subsequently).

It probably wouldn’t have mattered in this race, but we can’t say the same thing about the nail-biter San Francisco mayoral race, where London Breed won by only 0.6% and the rate of exhausted ballots was over 8%.<https://sfelections.org/results/20180605/data/20180621/mayor/20180621_mayor.html> As in the races we examined in our paper, her final count was less than a majority of valid first-round votes cast.

(To be clear, I’m not arguing that RCV is worse than the alternatives. I know Rob Ritchie will jump in with a spirited defense!)

Vlad

[The Ohio State University]
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