Ranked Choice Voting Can Reduce Polarization and Extremism
With political polarization inciting violent insurrectionists to the brink of toppling the United States Congress on January 6, and with one of our major parties refusing to hold the seditionists accountable, the Department of Homeland Security is warning of a “heightened threat environment” from extremists “emboldened” by the breach of the Capitol Building. America is more divided than it’s been since the Civil War. But there’s a simple solution to pull back partisan tribalism from the brink: Ranked Choice Voting.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a simple upgrade to our ballots that empowers us to vote for our first choice, but also to rank other candidates so an instant runoff can ensure that the winner actually wins a majority. You can read more about RCV here.
RCV can reduce partisan extremism because it allows more parties and independent candidates to compete without the worry of votes being “wasted” if a candidate doesn’t turn out to be competitive. If your favorite candidate is in last place, your vote just transfers to your second choice, and the process continues until a winner has more than 50%. More parties means more options to more accurately reflect the will of voters, and also a lower likelihood that parties will divide into two camps willing to destroy each other over a single political figure. The need to assemble a majority means that candidates are incentivized to find common ground instead of simply inciting their most fanatic partisans. So politicians would have to run based on ideas with broad support instead of simply igniting tribal hatreds or catering to fringe groups like neo-Confederates, the Proud Boys, and QAnon.
RCV could prevent not only a literal civil war, but also political civil war within both major parties. Our current system only requires a candidate to win a plurality, or the most votes, instead of a majority of votes. That means that if there are three or more candidates in a race, the “winner” could win with only 34%. That happens often in crowded primaries, like if you look at the results from early states in the 2016 Republican and 2020 Democratic primaries, in which RCV could have led to very different outcomes.
Primaries feed polarization because the most fervent partisans have an advantage against opponents who occasionally compromise with the other side. Since most states and gerrymandered districts aren’t competitive between the two major parties, the winner of the general election is predetermined by the primary. So most politicians refuse to break from their parties because they’re too scared of losing a primary to a more extreme partisan. But both major parties are going through identity crises that RCV could solve by allowing a multi-party system.
According to recent polling, both major parties are about evenly split within themselves: About half of Republicans identify more closely with a brand of conservatism that (in theory) supports the integrity of our democratic institutions, and about half identify more closely with Trump. About half of Democrats identify more closely with the centrism associated with Biden, and about half identify with the style of progressivism associated with Sanders and Warren.
As further revealed by the polling, more than half of traditional Republicans support making compromises with Biden to gain consensus on legislation, but up to three quarters of Trump Republicans opposed any compromise. So most Republican politicians will refuse to compromise because they fear Trump supporters turning against them in the primaries.
Amid the fallout from the storming of the Capitol, Republican legislators are openly speculating about the party’s sustainability. Trump threatened to create a new “Patriot Party” (a perversion of “patriotism”), and Rand Paul claimed that about a third of Republicans would leave the party if Republican Senators held Trump accountable for inciting insurrection. However, Trump backed off from the idea of a new party when most Republican legislators signaled that they would oppose impeachment, and he is instead aiming to help loyalists run primary campaigns against incumbents who sought to hold him accountable. But staying loyal to Trump has a cost as well, as demonstrated by tens of thousands of voters changing their party affiliation to distance themselves from what they see as a party taken over by radicals who continue sow disinformation and incite violence.
The solution to the parties’ divisions, and to our government’s consequential dysfunction, is RCV because it would empower each of these groups to run as separate parties. RCV also provides the only realistic path for other parties, like the Libertarians, Greens, Democratic Socialists, and American Solidarity, to be able to compete and demonstrate their true support without being dismissed as “spoilers.”
If you think RCV is a pipe dream, you should know that it’s already being done in Maine and in over 20 cities, including NYC, and it was passed in Alaska last year. The more states adopt RCV, the more likely we’ll be able to prevent future demagogues from inciting violence to divide and conquer us.
Passing RCV state-by-state is the quickest and most practical way to reform our system to reward compromise instead of conflict before it’s too late. There are already organizations in more than 30 states working to pass RCV before 2024. I’m on Rank the Vote Ohio’s all-volunteer team, which recently founded my state’s first nonpartisan nonprofit for RCV. We’ve been growing rapidly in our first few months, but we need more volunteers, donations, and endorsements so we can elevate our message and replicate the success of states like Maine and Alaska. Please help us or find a similar group in your state so we can save American democracy.
Kyle Herman served as an analyst and writer in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence from 2015 to 2017. He is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
