Ranked Choice Voting

Many of you were frustrated to learn that you couldn't vote for Luann in the primary election because only registered Democrats can vote in a Democratic primary.  As Harry Vanderspeigle would say, "This is some bullshit."

Why should the government need to know your political party?  Why should you even have to write it down in the first place?  What if you're fiercely independent and registered as "no party"?  What if you're fiercely independent but accidentally registered with the Independent Party of Delaware because you picked "Independent"?  What if you're sticking it to The Man and registered as a Jedi?  Or as a Mandalorian?

Well, unfortunately, if you did not very specifically pick "Democratic" as your party when you registered to vote in Delaware, then you don't get to vote in the Democratic Party's primaries here.

Our district, RD23 (north and west Newark), has elected a Democrat for over 20 years.  Often, nobody else even runs.  This means that the primary is the election.  The primary voters decide the election for everyone else.

Example: The Avengers

Let's work a quick example.  Let's say that The Avengers are going to run a candidate.  These candidates have all filed:

1. Iron Man

2. The Hulk

3. Thor

4. Captain America

5. Hawkeye

6. Black Widow

7. Falcon

8. Dr Doom

Wait, what's Dr Doom doing there!?  Oh well, he filed, so there's nothing that we can do about it.

With so many good candidates, people can't decide.  Here are the vote tallies:

1. Iron Man: 450

2. The Hulk: 300

3. Thor: 300

4. Captain America: 450

5. Hawkeye: 300

6. Black Widow: 400

7. Falcon: 300

8. Dr Doom: 500

Wait!?  Dr Doom won!?  Well, he got the most votes, so he won.  Congratulations, everyone, we elected a supervillain.

Mathematically, however, what we know is that only 17% of people voted for Dr Doom.  That means that 83% of people picked a different candidate.  And given that they all voted for superheroes, they probably would have preferred a superhero instead of Dr Doom.

This is where Ranked Choice Voting comes in (technically, Ranked Choice Voting With Instant Runoff).

In Ranked Choice Voting, you can vote for any number of candidates, but you have to rank them (first choice, second choice, and so on).

Once all the ballots are in, we add up everyone's first choices.  We can do this by making piles of ballots, one pile for each candidate where that candidate was the first choice.  If anyone got over 50% of the vote (if that candidate got a true majority), then that candidate wins.

If not, then we disqualify the candidate who came in last place and reallocate that candidate's votes to the next-ranked candidate on each ballot.  We continue to cull the last-place candidate and redistribute their votes until some candidate gets a true majority.

In a Ranked Choice primary for The Avengers, it is clear that Dr Doom would lose.  Just about everyone would have ranked all of the actual Avengers and not even ranked Dr Doom at all (some burn-it-all-down types might pick The Hulk and Dr Doom, but they would be a small minority).

What's magical about a Ranked Choice election is that every vote counts.  If your first-choice candidate doesn't make the cut, then your ballot is still in play for your second-choice candidate, and so on.  Because of this, you can actually vote for who you want to win, as opposed to voting for which candidate you think has the best chance of winning because of what you think everyone else thinks.  In First Past The Post, we are forced to engage in "strategic voting" and playing some stupid 3D chess game of figuring out what other people think, since everyone is voting based on what they think everyone else is voting for.