Ranked Choice Voting is Voter Self-Defense
The Extremes Have Become Too Dangerous and Ranked Choice Voting Is One of the Only Tool Voters Have to Stop It
In the wake of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK)’s defeat in the special election for U.S. House, there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth on the right about the horrors of Ranked Choice Voting combined with a top four primary.
I’ve thought about addressing these sorts of arguments in some long fisking of it all, but I’ve decided against that because it goes with a core challenge with many of my fellow conservatives. One of conservatism’s strengths is its ability to point out problems and risks with innovations. Progressives are often far too eager to overthrow the established order and not ask tough questions.
Yet, in arguing against change, many conservatives fail to size up the status quo and compare whether the status quo is better than a proposed innovation. Take this tweet from National Review’s Jim Geraghty in arguing against Ranked Choice voting:
That’s an understandable position in theory, but every system (particularly for primaries) are designed to produce certain types of candidates. If a state wants candidates who represent the parties best, closed primaries are deployed. If they want candidates who are moderate, open primaries are preferred.
As Geraghty says in his piece:
The advantage of the familiar “first past the post” system — besides that it is familiar — is that it forces voters to think about what they prioritize, and express one clear decision: “I like this candidate the best.” (Or alternatively, “I hate this candidate the least.”)
So its okay to have a system that forces voters to pick between the lesser of two evils but we don’t want a system that forces voters to do something else.
Dan McLaughlin heaps scorn on Ranked Choice Voting in an over-the-top manner talking about “chaos” and all other sorts of fear-mongering and then turns to his defense of the first past-the-post system in this one key sentence:
We should not mess with what works simply because we think that tweaking the system in ways that look clever in a political-science class will have predictably good effects.
McLaughlin thinks the two-party system using first past the post voting is working and the only reason to change is to be super trendy and nerdy. He further warns, “It’s time to end all of these experiments before they produce something we really live to regret.”
What might we regret?
Might ranked choice voting produce a President who seeks to overturn an election and a cast of cowards, sycophants, and extremists willing to go along with him?
Would it produce a Congress populated by extremist nutjobs who imagine they can remake the entire country with brute force with bare majorities? Or would it produce one full of grifters who see Congress as nothing more than an opportunity to prepare for a career in punditry? Might ranked choice voting lead to members of Congress who speak at White Nationlists Conferences or spout anti-semetic tropes?
This has all come to us as part of the first past the post system that McLaughlin praises.
What political utopia does Dan McLaughlin imagine he’s living in?
Our national government is full to overflowing with diots, or demagogues , and extremists pushing our nation ever closer to the brink. Some on the right have even called for Civil War. None of the most extreme and dangerous members of Congress were chosen through ranked choice voting, and most weren’t chosen through non-partisan primaries. Nearly all won through first past the post-partisan primaries that McLaughlin champions.
That’s before you even consider the glories of this year’s primaries. You have senate nominees like J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, John Fetterman, and intellectual giant Herschel Walker. You have election-denying Gubernatorial candidates like Kari Lake in Arizona (she who likes talking about male Republicans having “big dick energy”), Tudor Dixon in Michigan, or Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
And you know who agrees that the partisan first past the post pprimaries have produced weak candidates? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Despite all the challenges Biden faces, Senator McConnell has warned that the odds of the GOP taking the Senate are diminished due to candidate quality.
This process isn’t producing good candidates and is in fact, producing many dangerous ones. Voters in so many races are facing choices between candidates who support failed policies and those who talk like madmen.
In the swing state of Pennsylvania, examine the choice voters face a choice between Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D-PA) and Dr. Oz. Fetterman is a far-left political radical who deceived voters about the extent of his stroke prior to the primary. Dr. Oz is an unprincipled political chameleon and carpetbagger who made a fortune exploiting his hapless viewers by selling them snake-oil cure.
If Pennsylvania voted in the same way Alaska did with a top four primary, even if no vote totals changed from the primary, voters would have better choices in the Fall. They could rank Fetterman and Oz, along with moderate Democratic Congressman Conor Lamb (D-PA), and Republican Businessman Dave McCormick. Instead, the system has awarded Pennsylvanians this awful choice.
If It’s Broken
McLaughlin’s argument makes sense in a world where our politics is semi- functional. The idea of Ranked Choice Voting has been around for decades. I first encountered it in the 1990s and back then wouldn’t have thought of changing to it. Experiments with it were limited to a few municipalities here and there.
I would have agreed with McLaughlin in the 1990s or 2000s on the idea of ranked-choice voting. I didn’t like many candidates who won election, but the parties generally produced leaders who were capable of doing the job with some competency. I could see a case for ranked choice voting if you were creating a world from scratch but changing the way elections are conducted on a mere whim was inadvisable. If it ain't broke, don’t fix it.
That thinking was certainly widespread. Ranked-choice voting mostly caught on in trendy progressive cities and some college campuses, and otherwise didn’t really catch on.
However, that’s begun to change. Maine and Alaska both approved ranked choice voting through citizen’s initiatives at the general election. There are local political factors that impacted this but for this to actually pass you needed more than just a few folks who liked Lisa Murkowski as McLaughlin alleges.
The two parties largely dominate the country by sufferance. There’s a great mass of unaffiliated voters who usually vote only in general elections. For example, in Pennsylvania’s Senate primary this year, 2.6 million people voted. In the last Senate election in Pennsylvania in 2018, 5 million people voted.
The unspoken contract between the two parties and these voters is that the parties will vet candidates and offer the voters two plausible competent choices. In race after race, election after election for many years, all across the country, voters have been presented with choices of utter garbage candidates as both parties have been taken over by their extremes.
When you look at polls, voters sense America’s on the wrong track. They see that there’s a rising risk of political violence and unrest. Today, more Americans identify as Independent than with either political party.
Ranked Choice Voting is no longer a fancy or a frivolous thought experiment. It’s one way that ordinary voters can defend themselves against the unfit extremists and nutcases who have seized the reigns of power in both parties.
McLaughlin’s argument rings hollow because all is not well with our country or its political system. It’s like reading an argument against Independence in 1776 that ignores the events of the prior eleven years. Ranked choice voting is not chaos, our system as it operates now, is chaos and it is dangerous to our very liberty.
McLaughlin and other ranked-choiced voting critics can point out perceived failings and weaknesses in the system, but they refuse to address the flaws in the current system. They offer no effective defense of the status quo except that is familiar and the status quo. When the current system is helping destroy the country, that’s not enough.
Ranked choice voting is not a cure-all for what ails our nation’s politics, but it is a powerful weapon of self-defense against the dangerous extremists in both parties. Voters would be foolish to be swayed from using it by shallow arguments from a pundit class that thrives on dysfunction.