Ranked-choice voting can help us slow the anti-democracy whirlpool 📊 May 9, 2021
The improved electoral systems in Maine and Alaska will help preserve a coalition of reason among Republican lawmakers
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Ranked-choice voting can help us slow the anti-democracy whirlpool
The governor of Florida this week signed a new law, Senate Bill 90, that curtails voting access in a variety of predictable ways. It “limits the use of drop boxes where voters can deposit absentee ballots, and adds more identification requirements for anyone requesting an absentee ballot,” the New York Times reports. These new restrictions are notable as Florida has a long, bipartisan history of voting by mail. What changed after 2020 that made Republicans turn on their own previous rules?
The Texas House also passed new restrictions on voting this week. According to NPR, the legislation “would make it a felony to provide voters with an application to vote by mail if they hadn't requested one, or to use any public funds to facilitate the third-party distribution of mail-in voting applications.” It also sets a higher bar for the behaviors that would enable election officials to eject poll “watchers” from polling places. The bill heads to the Senate, which passed much more severe restrictions earlier this year and will now have to reconcile them with the House version before the law can head to the governor for his signature.
Just just like recent rollbacks in Georgia, the motivation for these laws is pure partisanship — an adherence to Donald Trump’s false claims the election was stolen from him — rather than the presence of actual fraud in our elections. Most Republican legislators have been forced to side with the defeated former president because he holds so much sway over the party’s voters. Last week, a Trump-endorsed candidate placed first in the primary for a special election to Texas’s 6th Congressional District. The candidate who spoke out against him came in ninth place.
These efforts are part of a cycle of anti-democratic behavior that is reinforced by our two-party, zero-sum electoral institutions. Republicans (somewhat wrongly) see higher turnout as a threat to their ability to win elections. In making voting access a partisan issue, restrictionists can get the party to do their bidding. I wrote about this dynamic in an interview with Lee Drutman, a political scientist and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, earlier this year:
A nascent democracy with plurality electoral rules starts at the surface level of a pool of democracy, making one or two revolutions around the vortex as parties violate a few norms or pleasantries in order to gain an edge over their opponent. But soon, the country sinks an inch — one of the parties has just restricted voting for a racial or political minority in order to win an election. The issue quickly becomes partisan. One or both sides gerrymanders its districts and the country sinks again. At each revolution, with the stakes of partisan competition ever-increasing, the party system is pulled deeper and deeper into the anti-democratic whirlpool. The suction need not afflict both sides equally; in America opposition to enfranchisement has becomes a litmus test for the right, which propels the country down the vortex all on its own.
Americans, pulled ever deeper into the whirlpool, face two questions:
First, what do you do when your governing institutions start incentivising anti-democratic behavior?
And, second, how willing are you to drown for your party?
If you, like me, are concerned about these efforts to restrict the franchise, there may be one remedy lurking right under our noses, one part of a larger solution to the first question above: ranked-choice voting.
Changing Republicans’ incentives towards smaller pools of voters could change their behaviors. It also insulates some Republican legislators from Trump loyalists.
Take Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska. When she faced a primary challenge from the right in 2010, she lost the Republican nomination for senator. She had to wage an unprecedented write-in campaign to hold onto her seat. A politician without resources, name recognition, or the connections Murkowski had may not have survived such a challenge; but survive she did, ensuring that Alaskans had a senator that was closer to their median ideology than the very conservative Republican nominee that could have replaced her.
After Murkowski voted to convict Donald Trump on one article of impeachment for “incitement of insurrection” earlier this year, the former president and his allies have pledged to oust her again. This time, she does not have to fear a challenge from the far right. Alaska adopted a new electoral system last year that insulates her from Trump’s efforts. Senate elections are now run in a two-round open system determined by ranked-choice voting. First, voters decide on a slate of four candidates to compete in the general election. Then, one winner is determined by the typical instant runoff process.
Under the new rules, moderate independents and Democrats will have a say over who runs in both rounds. So long as Murkowski is closer to the median Alaskan than whoever far-right Republicans pick to fight her, she will be fine.
The buck stops with Trump
To be sure, the Republicans’ recent embrace of voting restrictions is not only a product of our electoral institutions. They merely act as an incentive after the anti-democratic whirlpool gets going; someone has to nudge the party system into the water in the first place. Donald Trump alone bears the most responsibility for the right’s most recent turn against enfranchisement.
A new study from Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, finds that Republican voters were not any more likely than Democrats to perceive the 2020 election to be unfair in October, before Election Day. They only lost their trust in the process after Trump began campaigning against the results. To quote Hopkins:
… if you wanted to build an early-warning system, there weren't changes in American public opinion between late 2007 and October 2020 that would have tipped you off to the emerging threat. [….] if we want to understand 1/6 or anti-democratic efforts, we can't just look at general population polls. We've got to focus on the much smaller group of elites who mobilize people & the activists who answer those calls.
In other words, ranked-choice voting (or other reforms that decrease extremists’ influence over candidate selection) will not purge the anti-democracy rhetoric from the right. Most Republican politicians will continue to believe a lie that the election was stolen from their party leader, and the majority of GOP voters will stick with them, too. Only Trump can convince them otherwise.
Democracy relies on good-faith leadership from all of the actors in the polyarchy. But that doesn’t mean we should simply throw our hands up when someone acts in bad faith. While we wait for more serious reforms, and better leaders, there are ways to make demagogues less influential in the meantime.
Posts for subscribers
May 4: The Big Lie is the central litmus test for Republicans running for office. The right will have to decide whether It believes in liberal democracy
I am planning on writing blog posts for several book reviews and on other, deeper thoughts over the coming weeks. Subscribe to premium posts to get them in your inbox.
Links to what I’m reading
Here is a Twitter thread from Carl Bergstrom, a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, about some particularly heinous modeling and visualization errors by the HHS and New York Times in their coverage of covid vaccine hesitancy. The content is relevant to lots of the stats and election modeling I cover in this newsletter.
On the book front, I have really been enjoying Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers. It is one of those books that came out right before the election when I had absolutely no time for reading. It is a fun, accessible introduction both to old philosophers and their theories, but also what it means to think like a philosopher. More on that later.
I am also going to again recommend you check out Julia Galef’s new book The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Clearly and Others Don’t. I am a sucker for any book that deals seriously with thinking about how we think about stuff.
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Hi Elliott,
We need an election system similar to Germany. Ranked-choice voting for single-member constituencies and a party list vote system would be a better system. The President would be elected by ranked-choice voting. As you suggested before, it would probably be a good idea to split the executive branch between the President and the Speaker of the House, so the Presidency wouldn't be too strong.
-Elliot
Ranked choice voting is as close to plurality as you can get and still call it a "reform," if you stick with single-seat districts. Single-winner elections are a far bigger enabler of the doom loop than the inability to rank candidates.