There are many ideas on how to improve our voting systems and outcomes in the United States. Some states have a top two primary (often called a "Jungle Primary"), where all candidates run in one election, regardless of party, and then the top two finishers move ahead to the general election. The argument is that it helps to make the elections more competitive since, in districts that are heavily concentrated with voters from one party, the choice in November will often be among two members of the same party. There is also an argument that it helps encourage more moderation and less political extremism. Another approach is with ranked choice voting (RCV for short), which allows voters to rank a certain number of candidates in their order of preference. This approach is often times beneficial to lesser known candidates, or candidates who are running as a 3rd party since it allows voters to vote for a candidate without having to think about whether their vote is "wasted." It also is a quicker way to hold defacto rounds of voting and ensures that the eventual winner has the support of a majority of voters. This approach is in place for many elections in Maine, Washington, and now in the nation's capital. This June was the first time Washington, DC held an election with RCV and, overall, it seems to have been a success. The DC Board of Elections did a great job of reporting the results and even has an interactive set of charts you can check out. Since we couldn't just embed their version, we made our own. The most competitive race was for an At-Large seat where there were nine candidates. It took eight rounds of voting for the eventual winner to pass the 50% threshold. A good number of the races were over in the first round, with the winning candidate having more than 50% support, but in this race it seems that voters understand the system, and there is less room for argument that a candidate is less legitimate since they only won with 30% of the vote (i.e., 70% of voters chose someone else).
Key Takeaways:
🔢🔢🔢 Staying Put: For this specific race, in the first round of vote counting through the last, the top four candidates never shifted spots in terms of higher percentages. Oye Owolewa was the leader in the first round with 35% of the vote, followed by Lisa Raymond (16%), Kevin Chavous (13%), and Greg Jackson (11%). In the last round, Owolewa ended up with just under 51%, while Raymond had the support of 28%, and Chavous with 21%.
💡✔️👍Voters Seemed to Understand: Since this was the first time DC was using RCV, it is interesting to look at the data to see if voters generally understood the system or if there was mass confusion. For this race, just over 130,000 residents cast a ballot. Of that number, 99% cast an accepted ballot while less than 1% did not fill out the ballot correctly. Given the system being used, this was likely mail-in voters who made the mistake since in-person voting was either on a computer, which does not let you cast an incorrect vote (typically ranking the same candidate more than once).
🏁🏆🏆Voters Participated: Another number that is interesting to look at is how many voters ultimately did not factor into the final round of counting. This is mostly going to be voters who only ranked one or two or three candidates, and their choice was not one of the candidates, in this race, who ended up in the top three. In the 8th round of counting, 13,100 voters "ran out of choices" and their vote was not allocated to one of the top three finalists. Which means 90% of voters ranked one of the top three on their ballot.This is just one example of the RCV approach, and while there is unlikely to be a data set that points to the "best" system, this example definitively shows that voters can adapt to the system quickly, and many voters did pick lesser known candidates at first, but ultimately chose one of the top four finalists.
