[EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary
Justin Levitt
justin.levitt at lls.edu
Fri Jun 22 17:34:48 PDT 2018
To Jim’s point about plurality winners, I’ve found this map of the 2016
election <https://brilliantmaps.com/did-not-vote/> (and below) to be an
interesting teaching tool (though, as Jim suggests, different people will
draw different conclusions about what it teaches).
Updated numbers from last year indicate that Delaware should also have been
a “did not vote” state, while Trump won a narrow plurality in Wyoming. And
though there were hefty numbers of eligible individuals who did not vote
even in the states where a candidate won the plurality, I can’t help but
point out that same-day registration was available in 8 of the 10
jurisdictions in which votes for a candidate exceeded the number of people
who did not vote.
*From:* Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> *On
Behalf Of *Gardner, James
*Sent:* Friday, June 22, 2018 4:31 PM
*To:* Kogan, Vladimir <kogan.18 at osu.edu>; Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org>;
Foley, Edward <foley.33 at osu.edu>
*Cc:* Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
*Subject:* Re: [EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary
Vlad,
Thanks for carrying forward a very interesting conversation. I wonder if
you could explain a bit more about the underlying basis for your objection
to plurality rule, especially in circumstances where vote aggregation is
able to take into account intensity of preference, as is the case with
RCV. I’m not at all disagreeing with you, but I am genuinely curious about
the normative foundations of your position.
Clearly, you place a great deal of weight on the concept of raw,
plebiscitary majoritarianism. But why? What is significant about that
threshold, and on what normative ground? Moreover, there is a serious and,
I think, quite difficult complication in that position, namely – majority
of whom? Even where a runoff election is available to settle the kinds of
indeterminacy you postulate, it will not necessarily be the case that a
majority of *the electorate* prefers the winning candidate. Why is this
not a defect if it is a defect that a majority of *actual voters* don’t
prefer the winner?
In Ned’s article to which you cite, Ned says, “No one should win the
presidency when opposed by a majority of the electorate.” Yet, given low
turnout, isn’t it quite possible that *every* presidential election results
in conferral of the office on someone who is opposed by a majority of the
electorate (although not necessarily with sufficient intensity to go to the
polls and vote against that person)? The fact that an electoral system is
designed in such a way as to allow a plurality winner does not necessarily
indicate some deficiency of design; it may indicate merely that the
electoral system was designed to promote values in addition to raw
majoritarianism. (That certainly is the only possible justification for
the Electoral College, which, by the way, I do not in the least endorse –
not because it advances other values, but because the alternative values it
does advance – regional support for the presidency – are obsolete. To give
a better example, federalism also screws up the direct and accurate
transmission of raw majority preferences into the national legislature, yet
that is an alternate value that I think well worth protecting, although we
might quibble about the best way to do so.)
I’ve always found that justifying bare majority rule is actually harder
than it seems. The most straightforward justification is utilitarian – the
election results in the summing of individual preferences such that overall
utility is maximized, meaning that a bare majority is entitled to control
the levers of government. But one of the great objections to this view is
that our customary form of voting effaces differences in intensity of
preference – a charge that cannot be leveled against RCV. And if a voter
in an RCV system ranks his choices only for outsider candidates and refuses
to rank the front-runners, isn’t that itself a preference entitled to be
honored? Isn’t such a voter saying: “Here are the two or three people I
want to win, and after that I’m indifferent”?
Anyway, again, I’m not trying, as John Cleese says in the Argument Clinic,
to “take up a contrary position” so as to start an argument. I’m genuinely
interested in your foundational assumptions about what an election should
be doing.
Best,
Jim
___________________________
James A. Gardner
Bridget and Thomas Black SUNY Distinguished Professor
University at Buffalo School of Law
The State University of New York
Room 514, O'Brian Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
voice: 716-645-3607
fax: 716-645-2064
e-mail: jgard at buffalo.edu
www.law.buffalo.edu
Papers at http://ssrn.com/author=40126
*From:* Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> *On
Behalf Of *Kogan, Vladimir
*Sent:* Friday, June 22, 2018 12:59 PM
*To:* Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org>; Foley, Edward <foley.33 at osu.edu>
*Cc:* Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
*Subject:* Re: [EL] Ballot Exhaustion in Maine RCV Primary
Rob,
My focus on “exhaustion” is motivated by concern about the democratic
deficiency of plurality winners that my OSU colleague Ned Foley has
articulated <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795124>
quite cogently.* At a talk Ned has given a while ago, he laid out a
nightmare 2020 election scenario in which you have Warren (D), Trump (R),
and Kasich (I), and either Warren or Trump win a state’s electoral college
votes with a mere plurality of the vote.
Ned argues that RCV/IRV is a solution, but I’m not convinced. If enough
voters who choose Kasich have their ballot “exhausted” after the first
round, you still have a plurality winner (as happened in San Francisco this
time, and all of the other races we describe in our paper).
I also worry that RCV/IRV could actually make this scenario more likely by
weakening the incentive (and increasing the difficulty) for strategic
voting and encouraging more candidates to run. For example, we know that
Bloomberg decided not to run in 2016 because he was worried he’d just split
the Clinton vote. With RCV/IRV in place, this would have likely been less
of a concern, but could still have produced the same outcome if enough
first-choice Bloomberg voters didn’t rank a second choice and had their
ballot exhausted. (Obviously, much depends on whether these hypothetical
voters actually ended up voting in 2016 and who they supported.)
A couple of quick responses to your other points:
· My guess is that turnout in Democratic primaries was higher
across the board this year, so we need to be careful about how much of the
increase in Maine we attribute to RCV.
· You’re right that more people voted for mayor in San Francisco
that voted for governor. On the other hand, once you exclude the
“exhausted” votes, fewer ballots ended up making it to the final round that
determined the winner of the mayoral election (229,408 continuing ballots
in Round 9 vs. 244,137 in the gubernatorial primary).
· You’re almost certainly right that “some voters are coming out
primarily to back candidates who doesn't reach the final instant runoff,”
but it depends on what we assume about their behavior under the
counterfactual of no RCV. In the alternative 2016 scenario above, some of
the hypothetical Bloomberg voters who hypothetically don’t rank a second
choice may have actually stayed home in 2016 because he didn’t run. But
some may have also begrudgingly voted for Trump or Clinton. Had Bloomberg
run, his campaign rhetoric and advertisement might have convinced these
voters that Clinton and Trump were both equally evil and they should rank
Bloomberg and no one else. I don’t think we can (or should) assume that all
those who had their ballots exhausted would not have voted in the absence
of RCV.
· As you note, the previous concern is particularly worrying if
minority voters are most likely to have their ballots exhausted because
they rank only their co-racial/co-ethnic candidates, and these candidates
don’t make it to the final round. (I know Craig is doing some work on this
question, so I look forward to seeing the results.) Again, how problematic
this is depends on the counterfactual — what would Asian voters who
supported Jane Kim and had their ballot exhausted have done if she had not
run (anticipating strategic voting) or had not made it to a runoff in a
two-stage election? Again, I don’t think we know for sure.
· I agree that RCV could hypothetically change candidate strategies
in a positive way (e.g., by reducing negative campaigning). Perhaps London
Breed was ranked as the 2nd or 3rd choice of so many voters because she
worked hard to persuade them, as you suggest. Alternatively, she could’ve
made it to the top three simply because she had high name recognition
because she was the president of the Board of Supervisors and acting mayor,
and once voters had ranked the top one or two candidates they actually
cared about, they filled in the rest based purely on name ID. (We know that
name ID, and even ballot order, has a much bigger effect on nonpartisan
local elections.)
*Back in the day, Fair Vote was also very concerned about plurality
winners. Your website used to say
<https://web.archive.org/web/20101030061205/http:/www.fairvote.org:80/Comparing-IRV-With-Plurality-Voting>:
“Plurality voting, whereby the candidate with the greatest number of votes
wins, is the norm in most American elections. As a result, time and again
we witness some of our most powerful elected offices filled with candidates
who were not supported by the majority of voters. … In fact, the prospect
becomes very real that the winner of an election may even have been
disliked by a majority of the population. This is the first and most basic
problem with the plurality system.” Obviously, this problem is not solved
by RCV with high levels of exhaustion.
Vlad
[image: The Ohio State University]
*Vladimir Kogan*, Associate Professor
*Department of Political Science*
2004 Derby Hall | 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1373
510/415-4074 Mobile
614/292-9498 Office
614/292-1146 Fax
http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
kogan.18 at osu.edu
*From:* Rob Richie [mailto:rr at fairvote.org <rr at fairvote.org>]
*Sent:* Friday, June 22, 2018 11:18 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
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