Where That Rank Smell Is Really Coming From

Here’s another topic I’ve been hearing a lot about and I have a strong opinion on.  We’re hearing this type of thing in lots of places, but I’ll just highlight one.  This is from the quite excellent podcast Election Profit Makers:^*

David: This New York City mayor election isn’t going to be over for months, by the way.  I just want to put that out there—with the ranked-choice voting and everything, it’s going to be such a mess.  They’re not going to know who the mayor is until, like, Christmas Eve, I bet.
Starlee: Really?
John: There’s going to be lots of ways.
David: I think it’s going to take at least a month.  That’s my prediction.
Starlee: I still don’t understand it, the ranked-choice voting stuff.

No, no one understands it apparently, and comedians are having a field day making fun of how crazy and messy and silly it all is.  The Daily Show did a whole segment on it, and that’s just the longest parade of jibes I’ve been subjected to in the past couple of months.  The message is constant and clear: this a terrible idea that we should all laugh at.  And I certainly listen to what my media overlords tell me to do.

Well, most of the time.  Because this happens to be an area that I have some personal knowledge of.  You see, I used to work on electronic voting systems.  Back in those days, we called it “instant-runoff voting,” but it’s the same system.  Not only is it trivial to understand, but it’s actually quite good for our democracy.  Hasan Minhaj puts it best in this episode of Patriot Act (I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but this quote occurs at around 13:12):

Winner-take-all creates two-party systems.  You can’t afford to waste your vote, so you stop voting for candidates who reflect your values, and you start voting for ones you think can win.  But when everybody does that, we end up with just two huge mega-parties, even though 57% of Americans want a third party.  Think about the way we treat people who vote third party.  You’d be like, “Dennis, who’d you vote for?” and he’s like “Gary Johnson.” And we’re like “Dennis! what the fuck are you doing, man?” We treat them like they just left a baby in a hot car.  We’re like “what were you thinking?!?”

In fact, I constantly vote for third-party candidates, but that’s primarily because I refuse to let the two-party system win.  “Doing the math” and avoidng third-party candidates is what allows the Democrats and the Republicans to maintain their stranglehold on our political system.  And you can call that a “conspiracy theory” if you like, as long as you acknowledge that this “conspiracy” is an open secret that is enabled every election by millions and millions of people.  So my innate stubborn streak demands that I give the middle finger to all that shit.  But, to be fair, I also have the luxury of living in a state where my second choice always wins, so it doesn’t matter who single-little-old-me votes for.  If I lived in a more contentious location—a “battleground” state, as the media likes to call them—would I still have the courage of my convictions?  I don’t know.  On the one hand, I can tell you that I have voted third-party before when I lived in Virginia, and the winner there was never a foregone conclusion.  But, on the other hand, I can also tell you that the thought of voting for anyone other than Biden in the last election anywhere other than a solidly-blue state makes me very anxious.  So, I honestly don’t know.

But IRV (or, going by its new name, “ranked-choice voting” or RCV) solves all that.  With this system, if your #1 choice doesn’t have a chance in hell, that’s fine: your vote for the #2 choice still matters.  So I really don’t get why the media heaps all this derision on the whole concept.  (Of course, I never understood why the media heaped all their derision on Bernie Sanders either.  I mean, I understood why the Democratic Party did, and certainly some of that bled over into the media coverage, but you would think at some point someone would have to have the guts to stand up and say “hey, the idea that no one should have to die because they can’t afford health insurance is not a crazy idea that we should be laughing at” ... but that never happened.  Colbert couldn’t do it, Poundstone couldn’t do it, Kimmel and Fallon and Meyers couldn’t do it, and they’re all pretty famously liberal icons.  Trevor Noah came the closest, but I suspect that he’s about as anti-Democrat as he is anti-Republican: presumably due to his South African perspective.  Of course, Minhaj posits that anti-Bernie sentiment is also due to the winner-take-all system—back that video above up to about 12:18.  In this view, the media is just desperately piling onto Bernie because plurality rule combined with, shall we say, creative redistricting means that Bernie can’t possibly win, and therefore we all need to get behind the blandest possible candidate.  But I digress.^**)

The concept that IRV/RCV is complex for the person voting is just mind-boggling to me.  What’s your favorite food?  Okay, now what’s your second-favorite?  In other words, if you couldn’t have your first favorite—it’s not on the menu, or maybe the restaurant just ran out of it that night—what do you pick then?  This is so intrinsic to our human existence that explaining it is belaboring the point.  It’s like if I were to try to “explain” to you how to walk.  I might have to go into a lot of details about how your joints move, and how the myriad of bones in your ankles fit together just so, and the flexing of the muscles in the soles of your feet, and how you maintain your balance, and meanwhile you’ve already walked across the room and back five or six times.  You just know how, because it’s a thing you’ve been doing since you were first able to communicate with your parents—most likely before you could even properly talk.  No, you can’t have that thing that you’re trying to grab with your cute little baby fist.  Take this instead.

We could make a stronger argument that it’s complex at the other end, the part where you figure out who won.  But, the first thing to note is, you the voter don’t have to understand that part.  You vote, and then the winner gets announced.  Forget any ranked-choice anything: how much do you understand about voting “the old way”?  Do you know how write-ins work?  Do you know what a contested ballot is?  Do you know the technical details of how the votes are tallied?  Sadly, these things are getting more and more media attention as voting becomes more and more contentious, but I’ll still posit that most of you don’t know those things, and even if you think you do because you saw a news story about it, you probably still don’t, because the news story was likely wrong.  Also, it doesn’t matter whether you know the things or not: the winner is who the winner is, and, unless you’re one of the few people who has a political or legal connection to those election results, your knowledge or lack thereof makes exactly zero difference.

But let’s say we want transparency in our democracy, because transparency is always good, and so we want to understand how the results work even though we don’t have to.  Okay, fine: here it is.  You count everyone’s #1 votes.  Their #2 choices and #3 and so forth mean absolute squat.  You only look at the #1’s.  Does the person with the most votes have a majority (that is, more than 50% of the vote)?  If so, you’re done.  If not, all votes for the person with the least votes are eliminated.  If anyone picked that person as their #1, then their #2 is now their #1, and so forth—every choice just moves up a slot.  Now start over: count all the #1’s, other picks don’t count, does the candidate with the most votes have a majority?  Keep doing that till someone wins.  The end.

This is not a complex process.  If I wanted to adopt a less conversational tone, I could have used fewer words, but, even so, it’s pretty short.  IRV/RCV is about as “complex” as a baking recipe: there may be a lot of steps, and you have to do every step just so, but there’s nothing particularly difficult to grasp here.  It’s not calculus, or physics, or computer science.  Hell, I would consider most sports to be more complex than this stuff: try explaining to someone how basketball works in as few words as I just used.  Can’t be done, unless you leave out a lot of relevant details (i.e. the difference between a two-point shot and a three-pointer, or how fouls work).  There’s no details left out of the above explanation.  That’s literally all there is to it.

So what about this question about how long it takes to figure out the winner?  Well, first we should note that that, despite David Rees’ dire predictions, it did not take “months” for the winner of the New York City mayoral primary to be announced.  In fact, it took exactly two weeks (the primary voting closed on June 22 and the final results were announced on July 6).  And I would argue that it only took that long because the board of elections had a pretty major fuck-up in that time.  But suppose you think that even two weeks is too long to have to wait.  After all, we live in a culture that demands everything be faster: we want it all and we want it now.  One of my favorite observations on our modern world comes from science populist James Gleick’s book Faster:

Federal Express sold its services for “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” In the world before FedEx, when “it” could not absolutely, positively be there overnight, it rarely had to.  Now that it can, it must.

This is becoming more and more problematic with elections, because we’ve never known the results right away.  There’s a reason why “Dewey Defeats Truman” is one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century.  It’s supposed to be a cautionary tale about how our obsessive need for speed can lead us into false conclusions.  But somehow it’s become a meme about how newsapapers are stupid, and then we go back to throwing fits when we can’t find out who won the presidential election for a whopping 3½ days.  And the weird part is, most of this blowback is because of the rejection of electronic voting.  One of the major benefits of electronic voting was that we could get the results faster.  So most locations implmented that, and then people got used to getting results almost instantaneously.  And then there was this big backlash against electronic voting—and I’ll have to defer my opinions on how baffling that is for another post—so a lot of locations went back to counting things by hand, and now shit takes a long time again.  I think we just have to learn to deal with it.  Or else get over this completely overblown fear of electronic voting, because I can tell you from actual personal experience that a computer does not take months nor even days to calculate the winner of an IRV/RCV election: it takes seconds.  But, as I say, that’s a different post: the point is, if we want to believe that counting by hand is more secure, then we just have to accept that it’ll take longer, and that has little to do with whether we’re using ranked-choice systems or not.

I hope that more people will work to understand how easy ranked-choice voting is rather that just dismissing it with jokes and “commentary” that basically just boils down to “I know, right?” I think it really has the potential to change our political system for the better, and, quite honestly, it’s one of the few such things that I believe has any chance of actually being implemented.  It’s worth your time to look past the cheap shots and figure out what it can do for us as a country.

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* Specifically, from episode #95 (“All Hail the Harmonica Ripper”) which released on 5/25/2021 (starting at around 21:50).

** Or do I?