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Do you long for less polarizing elections? Do you think the two major parties have too much influence? Do gerrymandered districts make you cringe? Are you an independent voter who feels shut out of the process? Hard to blame you. But there is an answer: ranked choice voting.
Right now, Florida voters cast a ballot for one candidate in each race. In primary elections, including those for Congress and the state Legislature, the winner often doesn't get a majority of the votes.
With a few exceptions, only voters registered as Republicans or Democrats get to vote in their party's primaries. The closed system effectively shuts out 29% of Florida's electorate -- third party and independent voters -- from many of the most important primary races. Yes, the 3.9 million voters registered as No Party Affiliation in Florida could join the Democrats or Republicans, but many of them don't want to support the two-party duopoly, and who could criticize them given the polarization within the current system? After all, none other than President George Washington cautioned the nation about dividing into political parties and the likelihood that they would allow "unprincipled men" to "subvert the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government."
Ranked choice voting -- sometimes called instant runoff voting -- comes in many forms. The basic idea is that voters don't have to select only their top candidate -- they can rank some or all of the candidates if they want. Either way, if no candidate receives a majority of the first-place votes on the initial tally, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated. When a voter's first choice vote is eliminated, then their second choice vote is counted. This keeps happening until a candidate gets a majority of the votes and wins the election. The process is similar to a traditional runoff election, but it happens quickly. With the help of the right technology, counting multiple rounds can be done rapidly, hence "instant runoff."
Ranked choice voting would also help:
• Elect candidates with broader appeal. Any politician who hopes to win must convince enough voters to rank them first, but in many cases they'll also need second- and third-place voters. Instead of scorched earth campaigning, they have to listen to their opponents' constituents if they want to capture those second- and third-place votes.
• Support majority rule. A majority of voters -- instead of a plurality, in many cases -- will have helped elect their representative, even if the candidate was not their first choice. (It's technically possible for a ranked choice election to end with the winner not reaching 50 percent, but it hasn't happened often.)
• Create more choices from across the political spectrum. In the current system, Democrats and Republicans dominate partisan elections. In fact, candidates from outside of the two major parties are often described as spoilers. The oft-cited example is the Green Party's Ralph Nader siphoning enough votes from Democrat Al Gore to help Republican George W. Bush win the 2020 presidential election. In the ranked choice system, voters can make an independent or small party candidate their first choice without fear of wasting their vote or swinging the advantage to a candidate they don't like.
Ranked choice voting can be used to select a single winning candidate from a district, much like we do now, or select multiple winners, in a system sometimes called proportional ranked choice voting. The proportional system mitigates winner-take-all elections. The majority still wins most of the seats in a multi-seat district, but any group with enough voters can elect winners in proportion to its share of the votes. Think of it this way: In a strong Democratic district with only one seat, Republicans are often shut out entirely. The proportional system, with its multiple winners in each district, ensures a better chance of at least one Republican candidate being elected in Democratic leaning districts -- and vice versa. More voters would feel as if their vote mattered, especially in places dominated by one of the two major parties. Another advantage of the proportional system is that districts can be much larger, which can mitigate the effects of gerrymandering.
-- Tampa Bay Times