Editor’s Introduction: The Promise and Peril of Ranked Choice Voting

Tolbert, Caroline J.; Kuznetsova, Daria

doi:10.17645/pag.v9i2.4385

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Our proposed model, detailed below, is intended to achieve better proportionality than many other 'proportional' systems, simply by weighting the voting power of representatives in the legislative assembly by the number of votes each has received from the electorate -refining related proposals (Abramowitz & Mattei, 2019;Alger, 2006;Cohensius et al, 2017;Green-Armytage, 2015;Miller, 1969;Pivato & Soh, 2020;Tullock, 1967Tullock, , 1992. This straightforward intuitive change can solve, at a stroke, many of the problems and complexities associated with most popular variants of PR, such as party list PR (Wall, 2021), Mixed (Additional) Member 'top-up' PR (Linhart et al, 2019), and Single Transferable Vote or STV (Doron & Kronick, 1977;Gallagher, 2005;Santucci, 2021;Tolbert & Kuznetsova, 2021); see summary tables in the Appendix.…”

Section: To Improve Pr Let Each Representative 'Vote the Votes' That ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratising Democracy: Votes-Weighted Representation

Major,

Preminger

2023

JeDEM

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Democracy is in retreat around the world. To reduce the UK’s own democratic deficit, support is growing for some kind of proportional representation. We propose that existing versions of PR can be greatly simplified and improved on by giving each representative voting power in the assembly proportional to the number of votes they have been given by the electorate: “Votes-Weighted Representation”. Under VWR a country/region is divided into multi-member constituencies. Each voter has a single vote. Ballot papers list the candidates (each party can field several), whom voters then rank. The candidate with the fewest votes (top preferences) is eliminated, and their votes are transferred to next preferences, repeating until the number of candidates remaining equals the number to elect. Optionally, given sufficiently secure and accessible voting software, every voter can also have a 'dynamic' second vote, which they can arbitrarily split and delegate to any representatives from any constituencies, for however long and on whichever issues they wish; delegated votes are added to representatives’ vote weights. Any voter can override the delegation of their second vote on any issue, and remotely vote on it in the assembly themselves, directly. Compared with existing systems, these proposals will allow more accountable, more responsive and finer-grained coverage of the inherently multi-dimensional political space, including between elections. Fewer votes will be wasted, and better proportionality of voting power in the assembly should be achievable than under comparable Single Transferable Vote (STV) and highest averages or highest remainders methods for apportioning representatives. Also, fewer votes will be wasted compared with using electoral thresholds without vote transfers from eliminated candidates. Political fragmentation should be largely avoidable by using 6- or 7-member constituencies, without unduly compromising proportionality for bigger parties, or the diversity of elected representatives. Our proposals should help democratise democracy, improve its functioning, and reverse its global retreat.

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Section: To Improve Pr Let Each Representative 'Vote the Votes' That ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratising Democracy: Votes-Weighted Representation

Major,

Preminger

2023

JeDEM

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“…In recent years, scholars have shown a greater interest in assessing the potential promises and pitfalls of the RCV system. More outlets are dedicating issues to theoretical, experimental, and empirical analyses of how RCV works in the US context (Tolbert and Kuznetsova, 2021) as well as the potential for RCV to influence voters' attitudes towards democracy in general (Gutiérrez et al, 2022). As more states and municipalities consider implementing RCV, it is important to assess how the system performs empirically across a range of questions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Choices, More Problems? Ranked Choice Voting Errors in New York City

Cormack

2023

American Politics Research

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Examining the impacts of ranked choice voting (RCV) on voter efficacy is important as more areas consider adoption. The greater number of choices provided by longer RCV ballots may introduce opportunities for voters to misunderstand the ballot, make errant marks, or accidentally mark two or more candidates for one ranking, resulting in voidable ballots due to “overvoting.” Using ballot data from the 2013 general election, the 2017, and 2021 New York City democratic mayoral primaries, this paper asks whether voidable overvote ballots are more concentrated in constituencies with lower levels of educational attainment, average household incomes, and differing racial make-ups, and if this relationship is more pronounced under RCV than traditional elections. In the first RCV election in 2021, voters in locations with lower levels of educational attainment and median household incomes had higher shares of overvote voidable ballots than those in locations with higher educational attainment and incomes.

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Votes Can Be Confidently Bought in Some Ranked Ballot Elections, and What to Do about It

Williams,

Baltz,

Stewart

2024

Polit. Anal.

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We show that, in some ranked ballot elections, it may be possible to violate the secret vote. There are so many ways to rank even a handful of candidates that many possible rankings might not be cast by any voter. So, a vote buyer could pay someone to rank the candidates a certain way and then use the announced election results to verify that the voter followed through. We examine the feasibility of this attack both theoretically and empirically, focusing on instant runoff voting (IRV). Although many IRV elections have few enough candidates that this scheme is not feasible, we use data from San Francisco and a proposed election rule change in Oakland to show that some important IRV elections can have large numbers of unused rankings. There is no evidence that this vote-buying scheme has ever been used. However, its existence has implications for the administration and security of IRV elections. This scheme is more feasible when more candidates can be ranked in the election and when the election results report all the ways that candidates were ranked.

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Editor’s Introduction: The Promise and Peril of Ranked Choice Voting

Cited by 7 publications

References 27 publications

Democratising Democracy: Votes-Weighted Representation

Democratising Democracy: Votes-Weighted Representation

More Choices, More Problems? Ranked Choice Voting Errors in New York City

Votes Can Be Confidently Bought in Some Ranked Ballot Elections, and What to Do about It

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