Story problem #1: ranked choice voting - UPDATED

Update 6/21/2021 9:56 am CT: NY Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens do a mildly witty (well, sometimes it's actually pretty sharp and funny) written back-and-forth on current events called The Conversation.  In their latest installment, they spend a few paragraphs on ranked choice voting.  I've excerpted it at the bottom of the post.

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I am going to present two real-life math and logic problems.  This is the first one.

This first one is a logic problem.  It has to do with ranked choice voting.  Some support is occasionally expressed here at NewGathering for ranked choice voting.  In today's daily NY Times enewsletter, David Leonhardt explains how it works:

In a traditional election, people who vote for a long-shot candidate — like Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential nominee, in 2000 — can end up hurting a top-tier candidate — like Al Gore that year. With ranked choice, progressive voters could have listed Nader first and Gore second. Once Nader failed to finish in the top two, the final round of the election would have reallocated his voters to their second choice, which often would have been Gore.

Leonhardt notes that ranked choice voting is increasing in popularity:

Ranked choice has been growing recently, with Maine using it in federal elections since 2018 and Alaska set to begin doing so next year. More than 50 cities — including Oakland, San Francisco and Minneapolis — have also decided to use it, as have state parties in Kansas, Virginia and elsewhere.

(Leonhardt's article is prompted by New York City also offering ranked-choice voting in its mayoral election.)

The benefit of ranked choice voting seems clear:

The basic idea is to allow people both to select their favorite candidate and to indicate their preferences among the other candidates. That combination can allow the most broadly popular candidate to win the election, while also making clear the full spectrum of voters’ views. If Nader had received, say, 20 percent of first-place votes in 2000, it could have signaled the appeal of his platform and inspired other progressives to run in 2004.

But Leonhardt then complicates the narrative with what he calls the Alaska Dilemma.  Here it is:

To make sense of the complexities, I asked for help from Nate Cohn, who analyzes elections for The Times. Nate suggested we start by looking not at New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, which has eight major candidates, but at a simpler race — next year’s Senate election in Alaska, which appears to have three leading candidates.

One is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican incumbent who occasionally breaks with her party (such as on Obamacare repeal and Donald Trump’s second impeachment). Another is Kelly Tshibaka, a Trumpist Republican. The third is Al Gross, an independent who would likely be a de facto Senate Democrat.

For many Alaska Democratic voters, the order of preference seems obvious: Gross first, Murkowski second — and definitely not Tshibaka. Yet there is a major potential downside to voting that way.

If early polls, like this one, end up being correct, Murkowski could receive fewer first-place votes than either Gross or Tshibaka. Murkowski would then be eliminated, and her votes would be reallocated. Once the second-choice votes were counted, Tshibaka would easily beat Gross.

But if some of Gross’s supporters instead listed Murkowski first, she could receive the second-most first-choice votes and qualify for the final round. In that round, she might beat Tshibaka and win re-election.

This situation creates a dilemma for Democrats: Should they list Gross first, hoping that the polls are wrong and he can win? Or should they list Murkowski first, trusting the polls and supporting the more moderate Republican? The problem has no perfect answer.

Even without ranked choice voting, this Alaska race presumably would be a quandary for some voters. Under traditional single choice voting, third candidates whose followings reach or surpass a critical mass of voters have complicated election outcomes.  Traditionally, third candidates have accomplished the "double play" of failing to be elected in their own right, and also drawing votes away from the other candidate in the race whose politics and ideologies are closest to their own; thus the Green candidate draws away Democratic voters, or the Libertarian candidate draws away Republican voters.  Not infrequently, the election winner is the candidate who is farthest away, politically and ideologically, from the third candidate.  

In Chicago, some incumbents understand this dynamic very well, and will actually put third candidates on the ballot who can be expected to draw support away from a formidable challenger.  For example, in a ward with a white alderman and a large Latino population, the white incumbent may run a third candidate with a Latino-sounding name to draw votes away from a Latino challenger.

Ranked choice voting is presented as providing a solution to the third-candidate quandary.  But the Alaska Dilemma illustrates that ranked choice voting may not always solve the problem satisfactorily.

It's possible that, over time, voters will become more sophisticated and savvy at thinking through ranked choice strategies - or at least some of them will.  Having served as an election judge, I have to say that my view of voters is that "sophisticated" and "savvy" are not adjectives I would attach to all of them.  

Political parties could help significantly with such strategic thinking by instructing their voters how to vote in a ranked choice election.  If voters show party discipline and vote according to the party's strategy, the risk of an undesirable election outcome may be mitigated.  

When I was a young adult in the 1980s, party discipline was stronger than it is now (or at least, that is my perception).  What's more, of the two major parties, the Republican Party was the more disciplined of the two.  But that hasn't been true for several election cycles.

And that was before Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the GOP.  In the Trump and post-Trump GOP, party discipline has gone the way of the passenger pigeon.  Trump acolytes aggressively attack and "primary" any Republican candidates who stray from Trump loyalty.  That should work to the advantage of the Democratic Party.  Democrats surely are the more disciplined of the two major parties now.  But as the Alaska Dilemma illustrates, ranked choice voting can also work to the advantage of a passionate minority faction - which is an apt description of Donald Trump's following.

Update: here are NY Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens on ranked choice voting:

Gail: One last thing before we sign off: Tuesday’s our big Primary Day in New York City. And the debut of our new preferential voting system. It’s the same thing Maine did in the 2020 presidential election.

Bret: No idea why it didn’t occur to someone that what happens in Maine should stay in Maine. Like Moxie soda.

Gail: So I went to vote early, having painfully prepared to choose five — five! — mayoral contenders in order of preference.

Bret: I realize it’s a secret ballot, though I’d love to know who you picked last.

Gail: Then I proudly moved on to the next section and discovered I was supposed to pick just as many people for comptroller. Have to admit this one threw me. Really, do you think even the most avid student of local government can tell you who the third-best comptroller contender is?

Bret: I barely even know what a comptroller is, if I’m being honest. But I’ve gotta assume the third-best one must be Scott Stringer, since that’s the job he currently has.

Gail: Not really sure this preferential voting system is my, um, preference. Any thoughts?

Bret: Being the knee-jerk conservative that I am, my instinct is to oppose it on the “just-cuz” principle. Other countries that tinker with their voting procedures never seem to meaningfully change the quality of governance, even if it can shift the dynamics of a race. But, as you pointed out, ranked-choice voting does confuse a lot of voters who sensibly decide that they don’t have to become experts on secondary electoral races in order to make a political choice.

On the other hand, advocates of the system argue that it tends to work in favor of more moderate, consensus-choice candidates, while cutting down on negative campaigning, which America could surely use these days. I also read somewhere that the Australians have been using the ranked-choice system for a century or so, and the universe Down Under didn’t come to a screeching halt. So I’m happy to be persuaded either way on the issue.