Pierce County voters are participating in record numbers in a historic ranked choice voting (RCV) election with more choices and more security than any previous election.
RCV is simply better than the top two, the system used for statewide offices. It’s more efficient, more democratic and more secure. (For a description of RCV, see The News Tribune’s front-page article Oct. 12 or visit the auditor’s Web page.)
RCV produces a majority winner in one election, not two. Top two is just another term for a two-round runoff. The primary election reduces the choices, and the second picks the winner.
Because RCV finds the winner in one election, it is sometimes called instant runoff voting. In most cases, this will make for a shorter campaign season.
In jurisdictions that eliminate an unnecessary election, it’s possible to save a lot of money. San Francisco has saved millions of dollars by moving to RCV and eliminating a runoff. Unfortunately we won’t see this savings in Pierce County because we still use the inefficient top two primary for some races. But we achieve these potential savings whenever we decide to expand RCV to other races and jurisdictions.
RCV is not only more efficient, it’s also more democratic. In Washington’s top two system, relatively few people vote in the August primary. In contrast, RCV picks the winner in the general election, thus more people participate.
A strong democracy also provides voters with more choices. While the objective of top two is to reduce choice in the general election, RCV actually encourages participation of multiple candidates, and thus offers multiple perspectives on the issues. Pierce County is the only place in the state where voters can find more than two candidates on the November ballot. The county executive race is one of the most interesting and competitive in the state with two Democrats, a Republican and a third-party candidate.
In fact, the participation of the third-party candidate, Mike Lonergan of the Executive Excellence party, illustrates another positive characteristic of RCV. Nobody has dismissed him by applying the typical third-party candidate label of spoiler. That’s because RCV doesn’t have spoilers, wasted votes or vote-splitting.
You can vote honestly, putting your most preferred candidate as your first choice. If that candidate is eliminated from the counting, your second ranking is used. Since your second and third choices don’t hurt your first choice, it makes sense to use them unless you are completely indifferent about the remaining candidates.
In the traditional system, a vote for a third-party candidate is seen as wasting your vote. The media reinforce this bias by asking third-party candidates not about their positions on the issues but rather why they are even running. And the top two system virtually guarantees that a wide variety of perspectives won’t be heard at the general election.
Finally, RCV is an ally of those concerned about the integrity of our elections. It will improve election security and transparency. In Pierce County and other jurisdictions using RCV, the counting procedure actually produces a ballot image file – a record of the information on every ballot (without any identifying information, of course).
The auditor can put this file on the county’s Web site and allow voters to independently verify the official results, providing a valuable double (and triple) check on our public officials.
Pierce County’s elections department has decided to delay reporting of provisional results until the Friday or Saturday after the election. This decision has almost nothing to do with the RCV system itself, because the time it takes a computer to generate the report is negligible compared to the delay inherent in mail-in voting.
We encourage the elections department to post the provisional results of the RCV races starting Wednesday afternoon, so that the public can better understand who is ahead in the voting. The auditor could decide to post the current counts every evening – with the caveat that RCV results, like all election results, are provisional until certified.
RCV is more efficient, more democratic and more secure than the top two runoff system. Polls from other jurisdictions show that voters prefer RCV. The citizens of Pierce County are about to show the rest of Washington the future of voting.
Richard Anderson-Connolly is an associate professor at the University of Puget Sound. Kelly Haughton (www.rankedchoice.blogspot.com) is the author of Pierce County’s ranked choice voting charter amendment.
