ROYAL OAK, MI – Virtually every time there’s an election, vast numbers of voters are unhappy with the choices the major parties offer them. Many times, they like third party candidates better.
But when Election Day arrives, they face the same hard choice. The minor party candidate they like clearly can’t win. So, reluctantly, they vote for one of the two candidates who can in order to prevent the one they hate even more from getting elected.
“It’s not the lesser of two evils — it’s picking what people think is the less evil of two lessers,” Democrat Geoffrey Fieger told me when he was running long ago.
Other frustrated citizens, unwilling to do that, don’t bother to vote at all. But there’s a movement underway in Michigan and other states that might do a lot to dramatically improve voter satisfaction.
It’s called Ranked Choice Voting, and it will be on the ballot in a number of Michigan cities next month, including East Lansing. Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak. Called RCV for short, it works like this. Voters don’t just cast a vote; they rank the candidates according to how many are in the race. When the votes are counted, if nobody has an outright choice, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated and their second-place votes distributed among the others.
Let’s say there are a total of five candidates. If distributing the second-place votes of fifth-place candidate doesn’t produce a winner, then they do the same with the fourth place finisher, then the third, till somebody gets a majority.
Bill Gelineau, who was Michigan’s Libertarian candidate for governor in 2018, is a strong supporter of the idea. While he doesn’t think it’s a perfect system, “I do believe it to be the most effective, efficient, and morally defensible manner of allowing the masses to have their voices heard.”
When he made his own spirited bid for governor, Gelineau often heard from voters who said they really wished they could have voted for him, but that they felt they “couldn’t throw their vote away,” and so had to vote for the least obnoxious major party candidate, something the Green Party candidate that year agreed was true.
RCV, sometimes also called IRV, for Instant Runoff Voting, would eliminate that. A voter could have, for example, picked Gelineau for governor, and then made a major party candidate their second choice. People might feel their votes mattered more.
“First and foremost, this would allow for a better majority rule,” he said. But Gelineau, who owns a title business in Grand Rapids, believes it also might help detoxify our politics.
“Instead of demonizing the members of (their opponents) both parties might give their ideas a fair look, and treat those (with differing views) more respectfully in the hope they would cast their ballot for them in the second round.”
Ranked Choice Voting has begun to slowly catch on nationally. It’s now used in more than 50 places, including New York City and the states of Alaska and Maine for all elections, including national ones. But it’s facing opposition from the major party establishments.
In Washington, D.C., the district Democratic Party denounced it as “too confusing.” Republicans have been even more bitterly against it. After Alaska’s Sarah Palin lost a race for Congress last year, she called it a “complicated voter suppression tool.”
Donald Trump then weighed in, saying “it’s a total rigged deal, just like a lot of other things in this country.” What was ironic about those statements was that in this case, RCV actually helped Palin. She would have lost by a landslide to Democrat Mary Peltola in a conventional election, but she got more than two-thirds of the second-round votes, which still wasn’t enough to win.
Not all Republicans are against RCV; the Virginia GOP used it to nominate Gov. Glenn Youngkin two years ago. What isn’t clear is whether the major parties in Michigan would be willing to allow it.
Currently, Michigan doesn’t allow the use of RCV in even local elections, though it has been used in several elections in the Detroit suburb of Roseville as part of a settlement of a federal civil rights issue. Several other communities have voted to adopt it, however, if the law is ever changed. Last year, a coalition of a dozen Democrats in the Michigan House of Representatives introduced a bill to allow RCV. This was back when Republicans controlled the legislature, and they knew their bill wouldn’t even get a hearing.
Now, however, Democrats control Michigan government, and can pass anything they want to. But they haven’t reintroduced the bill to legalize RCV, and State Rep. Regina Weiss (D-Oak Park) the original sponsor, has not responded to questions about it.
Bill Gelineau hopes public pressure will help change that. “There are clear moral reasons to support RCV,” he said. Claims that it is “too complicated” are “a smokescreen for maintaining the current system that allows the two-party system to survive.”
Looking at the numbers, it’s hard to disagree.
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