Maine pioneers electoral change
Agreat deal turns on Tuesday’s primary elections in Maine. For the first time in America, ranked-choice voting — a system likely to reduce political polarization — will be used to choose candidates for governor and Congress. And the system itself, approved by Maine voters in 2016, will also be on the ballot, as a referendum. If voters rescind it, Maine will return to the prevailing system in this country — one that often elects leaders who lack majority support and turns off many citizens.
Besides losing the national popular vote in 2016, President Donald Trump got less than 50 percent of the vote even in six states he won. What made that possible was the plurality-rule voting system, in which each voter opts for a single candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the highest vote total, even when short of a majority. Plurality rule is used by all states in presidential voting and every state except Maine for elections for Congress and governor. But, by electing candidates whom most voters haven’t chosen, it aggravates polarization.
Moreover, it often deters appealing candidates. Trump and Hillary Clinton were unpopular in 2016; a late Gallup poll rated their unfavorability at 62 percent and 57 percent, respectively. Both Bernie Sanders (the darling of liberal young people) and Michael Bloomberg (supported by numerous moderates) might have made an attractive candidate as an independent. But both stayed out of the general election because they understood that, under plurality rule, they would be splitting the anti-Trump vote with Clinton and helping Trump to victory.
Ranked-choice voting — now being tested in Maine and increasingly in use in municipal and county elections across the country — helps solve both problems. Under this system, a voter ranks all candidates in order of preference. If no one is ranked first by more than 50 percent of voters, the candidate least often ranked first is dropped. The process then repeats until a candidate does achieve 50 percent of the top ranking. In that sense, that candidate has majority support and wins.
To see how, under rankedchoice voting, independents aren’t deterred from running, consider a hypothetical scenario: Trump, Clinton and Boomberg are candidates in a state, and the electorate divides this way: 45 percent for Trump (they like him best, then Bloomberg, then Clinton); 35 percent for Clinton (they rank her first, then Bloomberg, then Trump), and 20 percent for Bloomberg (they place him first, then Clinton, then Trump).
Under the current system, Trump wins with 45 percent, a plurality. And if Bloomberg doesn’t run, Clinton should win, since his bloc now presumably votes for her. But under rankedchoice voting, Clinton wins even if all three run: First, Bloomberg is dropped (because he is topranked by only 20 percent), and then, with two candidates left, Clinton wins (since 55 percent rank her first). Under this system, Bloomberg is no longer a spoiler.
Given Maine’s impending vote, we emphasize the rankedchoice system here. Yet we should note that an even better voting system is available — majority rule, which we wrote about in these pages in 2016. In majority rule, voters rank all candidates, as they do under ranked-choice. But now the winner is the candidate who beats each opponent by a majority in one-to-one comparisons. In the example above, Bloomberg emerges as the majority winner. Though only 20 percent of voters rank him first, most find him acceptable. He defeats Trump by a 55-45 margin, and Clinton by 65-35.
Majority rule hasn’t yet attracted as much attention as ranked-choice voting. But we hope it will do so eventually; failing to elect a candidate that a majority prefers over every opponent seems undemocratic.
The Electoral College poses a special problem for adapting ranked-choice voting to presidential elections. Within a state, Bloomberg won’t split the vote with Clinton under rankedchoice. But the college makes vote-splitting across states a serious issue: Together Bloomberg and Clinton might win a lot of states, but if neither individually captures 270 electoral votes, they both lose the presidency. One promising end run around this: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which a state pledges its electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner. It takes effect once states that together control 270 electoral votes have joined. The current total is 172.
The compact is worded to elect the plurality winner. But if that were changed to electing the “national ranked-choice voting winner,” that system would work as well for presidential races as it does at lower levels.
Still, national compacts — and majority rule — get ahead of the story. For now, the focus is on Maine, where reaffirming ranked-choice voting would be a real advance.
Eric Maskin is on the national advisory board of FairVote and the advisory board of Voter Choice Massachusetts. Eric Amartya Sen is an expert on the theory and practice of democracy. They wrote this commentary for the New York Times.