[EL] Single-Transferrable Vote

[Kogan, Vladimir]

Doug raises a very important point. I think the educational challenge in terms of explaining the system to voters is only a piece of it. Imagine also the voter education challenge in actually learning enough information about a sufficient number of candidates to be able to rank them in a way that makes your vote effective. I think that challenge is impractically difficult for a significant minority of voters, especially for lower-salience down-ballot races, and this explains why we see such high rates of ballot exhaustion<http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/files/2014/12/ElectoralStudies-2fupfhd.pdf> when IRV/RCV is used in local elections.

An important, and I think woefully understudied, question is whether this affects certain voters more than others. The answer has obvious political and legal implications.

From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of Douglas Johnson
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 1:34 PM
To: 'Rick Hasen' <rhasen at law.uci.edu>; 'Election Law Listserv' <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] Single-Transferrable Vote

While single-transferable vote sounds nice in the simple description below, I encourage list readers to consider how it works in practice, while keeping in mind how hard states are working to remove obstacles to voter participation and causes of voter confusion with our existing very simple elections. Now swap that current simple system for this:

If there are 5 seats open and 1,000 votes cast, then it takes 201 votes (1/5 + 1) to meet the “quota” that guarantees a win.
Now imagine a candidate receives 287 first-place votes. The candidate only needs 201 (70% of 287) votes to win, so 86 votes, or 30%, of the candidate’s votes will be allocated to the voters’ 2nd choice. But not all of the 287 voters have the same 2nd choice. So for each of those 287 voters’ ballots, the 2nd choice receives 0.3 votes (30% of one vote). So a candidate who was listed 2nd on 95 of those 287 ballots would gain 28.5 votes toward the 201 vote target in the second round of vote-counting (and yes, we would now be announcing fractional votes).

I suppose it is no surprise that such a complicated system is used in the city that is the home of MIT, but can you imagine the voter-education challenge explaining all of this anywhere else?

-          Doug

Douglas Johnson, Ph.D.
Fellow, Rose Institute of State and Local Government
at Claremont McKenna College
douglas.johnson at cmc.edu<mailto:douglas.johnson at cmc.edu>
direct: 310-200-2058

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