Dr. Rachael Cobb: Ranked choice voting
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Voters in six states—Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Oregon—will make decisions in this election about using ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, in future elections. Meanwhile, some cities and two states already use it—while ten other states forbid its use.
On October 22, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Rachael Cobb, an associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:19]
RACHAEL COBB: My name is Rachael Cobb. I’m an associate professor of political science at Suffolk University, and I study election administration and political participation.
Interview with SciLine
How does ranked choice voting work for voters?
[0:00:36]
RACHAEL COBB: If you are a voter going into a voting booth and you are presented with a list of candidates, usually you have to vote for just one candidate for your choice—who you want to win. Under rank choice voting, you have the opportunity to vote essentially more than once because you can give one person your first choice, another person your second choice, another person your third choice, and so on. So just as when you go to a store to determine what kind of ice cream you want, and you know what kind you want, you want vanilla, but they don’t have vanilla, you have a second choice, which is mint chocolate chip, and then you have a third choice, which is chocolate chip. So, you’re just ranking the candidates in order of your preference.
How does ranked choice voting work when counting votes and determining the outcome?
[0:01:29]
RACHAEL COBB: Well, this does depend on what system of ranked choice voting you’re using, but I’m going to talk about the one that’s most commonly used, which is essentially the instant runoff voting. And this is where if a candidate wins a majority of first preference votes, then he or she is declared the winner, and we’re done. But if no candidate wins the majority, we essentially have a runoff election, and because the person with the fewest votes could not win the election, we can essentially eliminate that person, but to ensure that who voted for them still had their voices heard, their votes are transferred to their next choice. So, you can think of this as eliminations, as holding runoff elections again and again and again, where we don’t actually have to do it because a computer is doing it for us.
Does evidence suggest that ranked choice voting reduces political polarization?
[0:02:26]
RACHAEL COBB: What we can say is that in some cases, it does reduce polarization. There have been studies where it has been found that essentially the middle vote person, the person who represents the most preferences, is the one who’s selected, but sometimes it depends on what kind of ranked choice system we have. And so, there’s one model called the condorcet model, which is about finding the most liked candidate by seeing who would win if they were matched up against—one candidate against each other. So, it’s like you just have all of these one-on-one matchups, head-to-head matchups, like a sports tournament, where every candidate plays against each other candidate in a one-on-one match. And in these cases, we’re more likely to get the median voter than we are under essentially the instant runoff model of ranked choice voting. We have found in cities where we’re looking at what we would call racially polarized voting that ranked choice does not seem to solve the problem of moderating those choices. There is a study at San Francisco State University which looked at the mayoral elections in Oakland and San Francisco over a period of time, and it found basically that racially polarized voting, in fact, increased, but it is possible that the interaction that happens at the local level, local politics and ranked choice voting, really is unique to those local circumstances, and we can’t really generalize to broader findings.
Does evidence suggest that ranked choice voting improves voter engagement and turnout?
[0:04:24]
RACHAEL COBB: The evidence on this one is also mixed overall, and it’s hard to assess, but let’s talk about what the theory is. The idea is that voters are free to vote for their most preferred candidate without fear of essentially wasting their votes. So, you stop playing strategic voter. You know, should I vote for the person who’s most electable, and under a ranked choice system, you can say, look, I’m going to vote for the candidate who I most prefer, but I would be okay with number two. I would be okay with number three. So, I don’t have to think as strategically. And that, in fact, might encourage me to go vote, because I will now be able to reveal all of my preferences, and I’ll feel satisfied that I did that.
Does ranked choice voting reduce election costs?
[0:05:18]
RACHAEL COBB: Well, what we do know is that under ranked choice voting, if you have a system of an instant runoff, and you, and then you implement ranked choice voting, you eliminate the need to have the instant runoff so you wipe out having that second election altogether, and that does save money. It can also, under certain circumstances, you could imagine could eliminate the need for statewide primaries, but that’s really a choice that parties make whether they wanted to have ranked choice voting under a primary system and then go to the general or not. So, whether that eliminates the need for an election is really based on how the state views that. But there are—so if you—even if you eliminate the election, there are upfront costs to getting started with ranked choice voting, because you have to get the proper voting equipment to be able to count, and you also have to engage in voter education to make sure people know the system. But once those are taken care of, those upfront costs are gone, and you can implement it, and it may eliminate that need for that extra election. So, it does save money. There was a study done at the MIT election lab by Christopher Rhode, who found that switching to ranked choice voting didn’t save cities money, but it didn’t cost them extra either. But again, that’s at the city level, and so extrapolating up to the state level is hard to do.
