By Any Other Name
Watch out for Ranked-Choice-Voting -- or any other cutesy name for it
If you hadn’t heard about ranked-choice-voting (RCV), this is for you. Even if you think know what RCV means, the Left is ginning up a new wrinkle to confuse you even more. Watch out for ranked-choice-voting or any other cutesy name for it, like “RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five,” a newer song from the same old playbook. It only gives the Left more leverage to control who makes it to the ballot.
What’s RCV?
A recent piece in the Arkansas Advocate explains why RCV fundamentally changes how our primaries and general elections now operate — a topic currently on the table here after the grassroots wing of the Arkansas Republican Party pushed forward a proposal to close the Republican primaries last year but was met with successful pushback from old guard Republicans. The Arkansas Advocate explains the way RCV works (and ends up promoting more centrist — read “Left-leaning” — candidates):
In the primary election, candidates from all parties compete against each other, with voters picking only their top choice, as in a conventional election. The top four or five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.
In the general, voters use RCV to pick the winner. They fill out their ballot by ranking as many of the candidates as they want, by order of preference.
If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-place votes are allocated. If there’s still no candidate with a majority, the process is repeated with the next-to-last candidate. This continues until someone gains a majority and is declared the winner.
At a basic level, RCV is confusing to voters — we vote for ONE PERSON we wish to hold office. It’s not a popularity contest to rank folks in order of our favoritism!
Nevertheless, the writer promotes RCV for its potential to
… change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under.
Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate.
Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue. It isn’t hard to find evidence for this lately, both in Washington and in state capitals across the country.
By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win.
Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.
Notice the italics we added. WHY would we care to vote when our votes “still matter, even if” our best choice is “unlikely to win”? Our government already suffers from the mediocrity of candidates supposedly vetted by “staunch supporters” who selected their best in a party primary — candidates who ran on certain statements and policies and, once elected, do not seem to follow through. We do not agree that RCV would result in higher quality candidates. This reiterative “who gets kicked off the island” approach just won’t raise that bar.
Watch out for ranked-choice-voting or any other cutesy name for it!