How to Fix Early Voting Problems With Ranked-Choice Voting

As the first results came in from Arizona on Tuesday night, observers were in for a surprise. Nearly one in five votes in the Republican Presidential Primary had been cast for Marco Rubio, who had withdrawn from the campaign a week before. In fact Rubio was third, close behind Ted Cruz. Were Arizona voters insanely loyal or was something else going on?

What happened was that Arizona has early voting, and many voters took advantage of it. That’s good for making sure you cast your vote, especially given Arizona’s indefensibly long lines on Election Day that resulted in disenfranchisement. But the number of people who failed to vote due to long lines was nothing compared to the 95,429 votes, that’s 18% of all Republican Primary votes cast, that were tallied for Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and seven other candidates who had withdrawn from the race. Making it even worse a higher percentage of such votes were cast by military voters overseas.

Rob Richie of FairVote has a solution.

There’s a straightforward fix to this problem: allow people to vote early, but using a Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) ballot. In fact, several states that have experienced this problem,Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, already send a RCV ballot to overseas voters in Congressional elections that might go to a runoff. In those elections, the RCV ballot is counted in the runoff for whichever runoff candidate is ranked highest on that voter’s ballot. That way, they can hold the runoff relatively close to the first round and uphold Federal law protecting overseas military voters.

Early voting specialist Paul Gronke and Richie first proposed this idea in a 2012 Roll Call commentary, with a focus on overseas voters. FairVote has also written a policy guide brief on it, with sample legislation, and at least two states introduced bills on the idea last year, Massachusetts and Vermont. This election season underscores that this right should not be limited only to overseas voters, given more than half a million voters so far have lost their vote this way this cycle.

The next logical step would be to use RCV for Election Day voters as well, with the system first used to allocate delegates by reducing the field to candidates above the threshold for delegate allocation, the reducing the field two to see who wins the state head-to-head. This cycle has provided dramatic evidence of the value of such comprehensive use of RCV, proposal, but it’s particularly appalling to see so many votes lost. Let’s make this the last Presidential election cycle allowing such disenfranchisement.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker