Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)

As mentioned earlier, India’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system leads to bad governance. To recap Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development, FPTP incentivizes governments to focus on the sub-groups who are “enough” to win elections instead of trying to deliver for everyone.

 

One alternative to that is called ranked-choice-voting (RCV). The idea is that voters rank candidates in the decreasing order of their preference (They can rank as many as they want, not necessarily all the candidates).

“If a candidate wins over 50% of first-choice votes, they win. If not, the lowest-ranked candidate is dropped and the votes of those who ranked them first are transferred to their second-choice candidates. This process continues until a candidate receives over 50% of the votes.”

An example helps. Say, there are 3 candidates, A, B and C who gets 36, 34 and 30 votes. C got the least, so he is dropped. The second-preference of the 30 votes for C are checked. In this case, say 20 of them had marked B as their second-choice, so 20 votes are added to B and the remaining 10 to A. Now B has 34 + 20 = 54 votes, more than 50% and thus wins the election.

 

Sure, RCV is different from the current FPTP system, but is it better? Yes, says Muralidharan. First, it incentivizes candidates to cater to and thus win the support of the maximum number of voters, rather than focussing on smaller sub-groups who are “enough” to win. Secondly, it reduces the role of “nuisance” or “spoiler” candidates. In our current system, such candidates are often propped up by rival parties to eat into their opponent’s vote share.

 

Third, it removes the incentive for “strategic voting”, wherein voters worry if their vote will go waste if their preferred candidate doesn’t stand a chance of winning. Voters then vote for the least undesirable candidate. This is not good for democracy since people aren’t voting for the candidate they actually like! Fourth, it allows for new parties and candidates to emerge. How? If their policies appeal to many people, they would vote for them without worrying that their vote will go waste (They can mark their second-choice candidate to whom their vote can be transferred).

 

Finally, it allows for coalitions to avoid haggling over seat sharing arrangements. How? Coalition partners could tell their supporters to mark their coalition partners as second-choice candidates.

 

Interestingly, we already use RCV system for electing the President of India! So this idea isn’t unconstitutional. A major concern is that it may be too complex. But people don’t have to rank multiple or all candidates. Even if they rank just 2-3 candidates, it would help move the needle for people to vote their true preferences.

 

An interesting perspective…

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