Mechanism of instant-runoff voting method (IRV) enabled the people of Minneapolis proper mayoral election and can restore your faith in democracy
Image Credit: Minneapolis Star Tribune
There has been ample coverage on the recent Minneapolis mayoral election, which featured a staggering 35 candidates. Little attention has been paid to the race beyond that count. But despite its initial craziness, this election might actually be the sanest exercise in democracy America has seen in a long time. The range of candidates coupled with mechanism of instant-runoff voting enabled the people of Minneapolis to sift through the entire political spectrum and elect their new mayor, Betsy Hodges.
The pool of candidates put the usual complaints about third-party candidates who mitigate votes from the two-party system to shame. The pool has been described by U.S. News as“muddled” and being full of “oddball candidates” in addition to hosting viable candidates like Hodges. Hodges had been an active member of the Minneapolis City Council, as opposed to candidate Captain Jack Sparrow. (es, there was seriously a candidate who took up the fictional mantle, complete with elaborate costume.)
As kooky as some of the candidates may be, the more ideas represented in an election makes it more democratic. This is especially important for variations within the same party. Hodges’s toughest competition came from fellow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) candidatesMark Andrew and Don Samuels.
The large candidate pool triggered instant-runoff voting, which enabled voters to rank several candidates. Without a candidate obtaining 50% of the vote, all of the votes are tallied and distributed amongst the other candidates based on the voters’ order of rank. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The recounting process is repeated until only one candidate remains. In this case, it was Hodges.
Instant-runoff voting is more justified with a large candidate pool that represents a wide range of political ideologies and policies. That was the case with the “crazy” election we saw in Minneapolis.
More views represented? More engagement from the voters? Yes, this election is a shining example of democratic process. Look past the crazy. Politics can still shine in America. Thanks Minneapolis.
Dale Sheldon-Hess says
Hodges would have been the plurality winner, the Condorcet winner, the Borda winner, and in all likelihood the approval and score winner, too. Despite the large candidate pool, this was an easy election, for any voting method, to get right. (And Hodge still didn’t get 50% of the vote; she came up shy at just 48.95%.)
More importantly, at no point did more than 2 candidates each have more than a quarter of the vote, because that’s when IRV tends to fall on its face, as it did in Burlington, VT.
I’m glad Minneapolis has such easy ballot access. I’m glad their new voting machines let them all-but eliminate spoiled ballots (in contrast to four years ago.) But IRV didn’t cause Hodges’ win.
Adrian Tawfik says
Thanks for your comment Dale. I am a total amature at this but wouldn’t this be true: “in highly competitive race like this article refers to, not wanting to have a second choice count against one’s first choice is important”. Does approval have a different effect?
Dale Sheldon-Hess says
That’s a complex thing to answer. My simple answer is, approval allows you to express a willingness to compromise, while IRV does not.
IRV advocates try to make this out to be a positive, by claiming it’s good that, by standing firm, your later choices can cause no harm to your preferred candidate, for as long as they have any chance of winning (they call this “later-no-harm”). But by refusing to compromise (and, perhaps, you’ll be familiar with this from everyday life) you will sometimes end up with a result that is worse, in your estimation, than the offered compromise would have been.
Let me go back to Burlington, VT for my example. In that race, the 3 top candidates were a Republican, a Democrat, and the incumbent, a member of the Vermont Progressive Party. As you would expect, voters who preferred the Progressive tended to have the Democrat as their 2nd choice of those 3, as did the Republican voters (although they weren’t exactly happy about.) And by a strong margin, Democratic voters preferred the Progressive over the Republican. The votes looked something like this:
33%: P > D > R
18%: D > P > R
12%: D > R > P
37%: R > D > P
IRV eliminates the D first, since they have only 30% in total. And then P wins with 51%. But if the R voters had been able to express a willingness to compromise, they could have ended up with the D winning instead of the P (not a great outcome in their eyes, but still an improvement.)
This election, unlike Minneapolis, would have had a different winner under Condorcet or Borda rules when using the exact same ballot-rankings: the Democrat. (And the Democrat would most probably have won under approval and score, although it’s hard to be 100% sure since the ballots are so different in form.) Actually, under almost every other voting system every proposed by humankind, the Democrat would have won. The only exceptions are IRV (winner: Progressive) and plurality (winner: Republican.) That’s because every method besides these two is better-able to find the compromise being offered. IRV’s intransigence forces the Republican voters to stand pat (“R or nothing!”) while the compromise is eliminated, and then their worst-possible choice, the Progressive, is elected.
I mean, just look at those numbers: 63% prefer D over P, and 67% prefer D over R. Those would be overwhelming majorities in any 1-on-1 race. But D lost, because IRV doesn’t let one “have a second choice count against one’s first choice.” I don’t see that as being a positive. And neither did Burlington, which is why they eliminated IRV before the next mayoral election. Sadly, they went back to plurality (with a runoff), and it will probably be a generation before they’re willing to try anything else that’s “new” or “different” when it comes to voting methods.
Adrian Tawfik says
I really am not enough of an expert to make a choice between the two and anyway I plan to keep this website as a place where all types of election reforms are discussed and debated. I try to keep posting all the news I can about different election related news and I have found out that election methods are a hot topic of debate. I hope this site helps to make people aware of things like this. Where is the IRV supporter to debate you? I am just an enabler!