Ranked-choice voting is the best representation of the majority vote

The argument

Majority rule is a core part of democracy, and this argument holds that ranked-choice voting is the best representation of the majority vote. The standard it sets is straightforward: a system should produce the winner that most voters actually prefer, and it should be judged by whether it does so reliably. Other voting systems fail that test. The electoral college has been criticised for not electing the majority choice, and alternative voting systems more generally allow a candidate to win even if they do not win the majority — an outcome that follows whenever a field is divided and a plurality is enough to take the whole prize. When that happens, the declared winner may be the first choice of a minority and the last choice of everyone else, which is the opposite of what majority rule is supposed to deliver. Ranked-choice voting builds the requirement into the count itself. Gaining the majority — at least 50 percent of first-choice votes — is a requirement for a candidate to win, so no one takes office on a divided field alone, and the requirement ensures that a demographic's most preferred candidate wins the election. The procedure for reaching that threshold is what makes it workable. If no candidate earns a majority, the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated, and if a voter's first-choice candidate is removed, the vote is transferred to their next preferred candidate. No ballot is discarded for having backed an unpopular candidate; it continues to count for whoever that voter prefers among those remaining. The process reduces the choices until a true representation of the majority vote can be determined. Since majority rule is one of the key features of democracy, the argument concludes, democracies should implement this voting system in all elections.

Context

The main principle of ranked-choice voting is to allow voters to rank candidates based on their preferences. A candidate wins if they receive at least 50 percent of the first-choice votes.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Ranked-choice voting can promote ballot exhaustion, in which voters rank too few candidates for the ballot to be meaningful. If a voter only ranks one candidate, and that candidate is eliminated, the vote is nullified. If many voters rank too few candidates, it may be impossible to have a majority number of total votes due to an influx of invalid votes. For example, a study by Craig Burnett and Vladimir Kogan analyzed ranked-choice voting in four local elections in California and Washington. In all four elections, the winner did not receive the majority of total votes. Ballot exhaustion forced too many ballots to be deemed invalid, so no candidate actually received at least 50 percent of total votes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The comparison is misdirected. The electoral college is a method of aggregating state results for a single national office, not a ballot-counting rule, so the failure identified concerns federal aggregation rather than how preferences are counted. [Rejecting P2] The majority the process produces is a majority of remaining valid ballots, not of votes cast. Where voters rank few candidates their ballots exhaust and drop out of the count, so — as the four-election study in the counter reports — the eventual winner may hold well under half the original total. The argument also names its own limit when it says the process 'reduces the choices for voters', which describes eliminating options rather than representing them.