My toughest vote of 2024

DC's ranked choice voting ballot initiative

I did not have a hard time deciding who to cast my presidential ballot for.

In local elections, meanwhile, I voted to re-elect my local ANC commissioner,¹ and I voted enthusiastically to re-elect Christina Henderson to an at-large seat on the DC Council and Brooke Pinto to the seat representing the ward I live in. Henderson and Pinto happen to be the best members of the Council, and neither are facing meaningful opposition, so those were easy choices. I also made a fruitless protest vote against Robert White, also an at-large incumbent on the Council and also overwhelmingly likely to be re-elected.²

What was a tough choice was Initiative-83, a ballot initiative to shift the District to ranked-choice voting (RCV) and also from closed to semi-open primaries.

I’m pretty annoyed by the whole thing. It seems like dirty pool to yoke these two unrelated reforms together in a single package. I think semi-open primaries don’t really make sense and might actually be worse in DC than the status quo. RCV, meanwhile, is something that I do support. But my support is pretty lukewarm, and I think the significant national organizing energy behind is unfortunate. I’d love to see election reformers focused on something more consequential, like proportional representation, and I’m concerned that each incremental RCV win only encourages people to spend more time pushing for RCV.

On the other hand, First Past The Post voting is trash, so I voted for Initiative-83, despite being annoyed.

But I’ve heard from a surprising number of voters over the last week who also felt torn on this question in DC, and on similar initiatives in other states, so I thought it might be helpful to step back and talk through the pros and cons of ranked choice voting.

The logic of RCV

The obvious problem with First Past The Post is that any time you have more than two candidates in a race, you have to spend tons of time pleading with people to falsify their own preferences.

In San Francisco, for example, the incumbent moderate-by-San-Francisco-standards mayor, London Breed, is being challenged by two other moderates, but also by a leftist. Because San Francisco uses RCV for municipal races, we can be reasonably confident that a moderate mayor is going to win and very confident that if the leftist candidate wins, it’ll be because the voters sincerely prefer a leftist mayor. In a FPTP dynamic, the three moderates run the risk of splitting the vote and letting the leftist sneak in with minimal support. Of course, that kind of vote-splitting dynamic can be avoided through strategic organization and tactical voting. But campaigns have to ask people who have qualms with the incumbent and genuinely prefer someone else to pretend that’s not the case.

By the same token, with RCV, if you’re a hard-core leftist who thinks Kamala Harris is fatally compromised by her embrace of capitalism, support for Israel, and law-and-order stances, you could rank a leftist candidate as your first choice and still note that you prefer Harris to Trump.

The opposition to the measure in DC is being led by the District’s official Democratic Party organization, which opposes opening primaries to non-Democrats for sort of obvious reasons and also maintains that RCV is too confusing:

“No to open primaries. No to ranked choice voting,” said Stuart Anderson, who serves as the Second Vice Chair of the Ward 8 Democrats. “We don't believe that instituting either or both helps legitimize the electoral process.”

On the contrary, he and the party believe ranked choice voting could confuse voters and belabor the process — on the front and back end of an election.

“We know that less than 50% of the voting population is voting,” Anderson said. “We should be spending money on trying to figure out how do we get these people to the polls -- as opposed to trying to create systems that make it more cumbersome for those who are already coming to the polls.”

Just ranking a list of candidates in order is actually not very confusing. But it is true that the detailed math of who gets eliminated and how the votes get redistributed is pretty complicated. It’s also true that people with lower levels of political information, especially poorer and less-educated voters, are less likely to have opinions about a large number of candidates and therefore less likely to rank them all.

This just doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling objection to me. DC recently had a 10-way primary for a Council seat in Ward 7, and the winning candidate prevailed with 23.6 percent of the vote.

It’s true that in an RCV scenario, many of the people who cast “wasted” votes for candidates other than Payne and Felder wouldn’t have ranked the full field, and their votes would have ended up wasted anyway. But this doesn’t leave them any worse off.

RCV doesn’t really solve major urban governance problems, but it does seem marginally better than the status quo.

Advocates are pairing reforms

There are several ballot initiates across the country dealing with ranked choice this year, and most of them pair it with another reform:

• In Idaho and Colorado, voters are considering initiatives that would adopt top-four jungle primaries, followed by ranked-choice general elections.

• Nevada has a similar proposal, but it’s structured as a top-five.

• Alaska currently uses top-four + RCV, but is considering an initiative to return to traditional primaries.

The goal of the reforms looking to swap FPTP for RCV is to help moderate candidates win elections.

Taking Alaska as an example, because that’s where the system is in place, the basic thought is that Lisa Murkowski is not conservative enough to win a Republican Party primary, but a very right-wing Republican would beat a mainstream Democrat in a general election. But if you do a top-four jungle primary, then Murkowski emerges as one of the four finishers and then, based on second-choice votes from Democrats, prevails in the general election.

This is a bizarre kludge in my opinion, but I do support the goal, and it is basically working.

It also has the right enemies. A recent American Prospect article complaining about these top-four initiatives said that the system “tends to favor candidates with political profiles so mushy that they’re the third, fourth, or fifth choice of the above-mentioned loyalists.”

This is good, though! American politics is insanely polarized right now, with only seven out of 43 states meaningfully contested in the presidential election. But it would be very healthy for the United States if the 43 non-close states featured meaningful electoral competition between ideologues and pragmatists over who gets sent to the United States Senate. Insisting that anyone who doesn’t favor large, across-the-board departures from the status quo is unacceptably “mushy” is ridiculous. The United States is the richest country on earth, and it’s totally reasonable for most people to be risk-averse about many policy topics.

DC, though, is pairing RCV with a totally different process of reform.

The idea here is to continue holding partisan primaries for Council elections, but to open those primaries up to registered independents. I do not love this. There are very few registered Republicans in DC, but it’s not zero. What the city needs to improve governance is a situation in which those Republicans can deliver votes that help moderate Democrats who take public safety and economic growth seriously. Truly open primaries that would let Republicans cross over and vote in Democratic primaries could accomplish that. But so could shifting to RCV and making the Council elections non-partisan. So could doing top-four jungle primaries.

My hope is that opening DC primaries to independents at least brings some more moderates into the mix. My fear is that the typical DC independent is a hardcore socialist. There unfortunately is not any hard data on this, and when I surveyed people who are more deeply involved in local politics than I am, they all agreed it’s a good question and then disagreed with each other about the answer. So, despite some trepidation, I am voting yes.

The correct solution is proportional representation

What’s most frustrating to me about all of this is that while top-four is well-suited to the particular problem of how to help Lisa Murkowski win elections in Alaska (a goal that I support), the broader governance question has a much better answer: proportional representation.

Right now, the DC Council has eight members who each represent one ward of the city, plus four at-large members and a council president who is also elected at-large.

We could — and should — instead have 13 at-large members elected via proportional representation. You would use what’s called the “single-transferrable vote” (STV), which is basically RCV for a multi-member system. The specific implementation details of this are a little complicated under the hood, but the voting process is just the same as RCV, ranking candidates in order of preference. You then look at everyone’s first choices and eliminate the least popular candidate, and then redistribute the votes of the people who backed that guy to their second choice. Then you eliminate the second-least-popular candidate. And so on and so forth, down the line. You end up with a Council that is roughly representative of the range of views in the District electorate, meaning probably one honest-to-God Republican, one or two leftists, and then a range of Democratic flavors.

Proportional systems aren’t perfect, of course, and they don’t magically solve social or political problems.

But they do achieve the goals that election reformers seem to be aiming for: Everybody’s vote counts, tactical considerations matter much less, relatively moderate elected officials control the pivotal seats unless the public sincerely prefers a more extreme solution, and you get side benefits like less negative campaigning.

In my experience, a lot of RCV campaigners don’t really disagree with this, they just think the push helps lay the groundwork for bigger reforms. I hope that’s right! But I worry about it as a theory of change. Passing ballot initiatives that make relatively unimportant changes isn’t actually that much easier than passing initiatives that make important, substantive changes. It’s already on the ballot, so I’m voting for it, but I’d be much happier to see more effort going into more consequential reforms.

1. This is a form of hyper-local DC government where each commissioner represents just a few blocks.

2. There are two at-large seats reserved for non-Democrats. It’s broadly understood that Henderson and White, the two incumbents, are independents-in-name-only (Henderson used to be a Chuck Schumer staffer and White challenged the incumbent mayor from the left in the Democratic primary two years ago). The other people running are a Republican who can’t possibly win and a guy nobody has ever heard of.