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New York City Votes for a Better Way to Vote

New York City Votes for a Better Way to Vote

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A serious drawback of traditional winner-take-all voting is that a candidate who’s deeply disliked can win office as long as the opposition is divided. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won their parties’ presidential nominations in 2016, even though they had the highest unfavorability ratings of any major-party candidates in decades.

There is a better way to vote called ranked-choice voting, and on Nov. 5, voters in New York City chose it for citywide primaries and special elections starting in 2021. The charter amendment had nearly 74% of the votes with 90% of the votes counted, according to the New York Times.

With a population of more than 8 million, New York City is by far the biggest jurisdiction to sign on to ranked-choice voting, tripling overnight the number of people who live in places that have it. It’s already been adopted for various races by San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Oakland, Calif., as well as the state of Maine.

In ranked-choice elections, voters don’t pick just their favorites. They’re also allowed, though not required, to rank everyone else on the ballot in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority the first time around, there’s an instant runoff. The candidate who garnered the fewest first-place votes is dropped. The votes he or she got are transferred to whoever the voters listed next on their ballots. The process continues until someone gets a majority. Here’s a diagram showing how it worked in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2018. 

Changing how we vote wouldn’t tend to benefit either Democrats or Republicans on average, says Drew Penrose, law and policy director of FairVote, an organization that supports ranked-choice voting. “Unfortunately,” says Penrose, “electoral reform itself has gotten a partisan tinge to it on the national level.” In other words, he says, Republicans are more likely to prefer the status quo.

Could we pick our presidents this way some day? Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, endorsed the system last year. If states and cities keep adopting ranked-choice voting, the federal government may not be far behind. “The way in which reforms happen is exactly this way. They start at the county or municipal level. Voters become familiar with them, and then it’s easier to lift them up to the state or national level,” says Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, which supported the New York City initiative.

If ranked-choice voting isn’t enough of a departure for you, consider something even more innovative: quadratic voting, which also discourages zealotry by making it costly to put all your eggs in one basket. You get points to “spend” on multiple votes. Your first vote for a candidate costs just one point, but the second costs four (two squared), the third costs nine (three squared), and so forth.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eric Gelman at egelman3@bloomberg.net

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