Ranked choice voting: the solution to a lot of America's problems

What it is

If you think about any political party, especially in the United States, what kind of rhetoric do you think of? To start, I'll talk about the Republican party, an especially stark example. Over the past few years, they've grown from being mostly just political and social conservatives to being led by Donald Trump, whose out-of-the-blue right-radicalness speaks for itself. Although Trump's rhetoric against his enemies (specifically Democrats) has admittedly been a little stronger than in your average political campaign, the intent behind his messaging is the same as many politicians'. Because of how America's election system is set up (more on that later), Trump—like other politicians across the political spectrum—is motivated to focus a lot of his speech on attacking other political parties, rather than building actual plans and policies. Since voters tend to behave as their candidates do, politicians' aggressive campaigning against other parties causes voters to participate in a something called negative partisanship. A negatively partisan person, like the politicians they vote for, bases much of their political identity on taking down another party, and less on upholding their party's actual values and goals. Many people would say that the U.S. has brought this to the next level, and become an almost wholly negatively partisan country.

Why this is bad

Essentially, negative partisanship is bad because of the effects it has on the political (and therefore societal) environment of a country. Negative partisanship drives political parties apart, creating a country that is not only divided, but polarized. And the plain truth is that in a democratic system like the U.S.'s, polarization prevents any real progress and leaves hundreds of serious problems unsolved. Take the recent controversy over the extension of a covid stimulus bill, for example. As time started running out for millions of struggling Americans, a divided House couldn't reach a compromise for the bill. As a result, there's still no extension to the stimulus bill, leaving many Americans below the poverty line at a loose end.

How to solve it

As with any problem, the key to solving negative partisanship is to look at its roots. We need to ask why this pattern of aggressiveness happens. The answer? The voting system.

If you look closely at how America's election system works, it becomes clear that there's a problem: a candidate doesn't actually have to be favoured by a majority of voters to win—all they have to do is get more votes than any other candidate. For example, if there are three candidates in an election and Daffodil gets 15% of the vote, Violet gets 39%, and Daisy has 46%, Daisy would still win with 46% of the vote, even though most people (Violet and Daffodil's combined 54%) opposed her. This issue might seem irrelevant to the problem of negative partisanship, but it's actually not. They share the same solution. This solution is called ranked-choice voting.

A ranked-choice voting ballot allows for voters to rank their candidate choices from first to last, instead of just picking one. When votes are being counted, say, in the three-candidate scenario I described earlier, Daffodil would be "out", since she only got 15% of the vote. The people counting votes would then look at the ballots of all the people whose first choice was Daffodil, and count at their second choice. If their second choice was Daisy, then Daisy would gain more votes, and if it was Violet, she would gain more. (Confused? This video explains it more in depth). Maine has actually put ranked-choice voting into action, with astonishingly positive results (see video linked above). An election system that includes ranked-choice voting promotes collaboration between parties and candidates, and if that wasn't enough already, also minimizes negative partisanship. I'd certainly call that a win-win.