(Screenshot image taken from the YouTube account of 'The Jimmy Dore Show')
I still tend to think of Ranked Choice Voting as one of those issues that most people seem to get wrong and I truly don’t understand why. ‘Progressives’ are usually the ones willing to accentuate it’s virtues and to call for its implementation, while it’s the more centrist, neoliberal Democrats who oppose its adoption, choosing to retain the current system of voting. In holding these views both factions seem blind to RCV’s latent potential in become a tool to maintain the monopolist hold that the two-party duopoly has over our system of government. And while I could write pages on my thoughts about RCV, for this essay, I’d rather just critique the progressive arguments (1) that are made in favor of RCV.
As Dore does his usual introduction whereby he play acts as an out-of-touch viewer who ponders an open question to himself, we see a tweet to the left of Jimmy which reads:
You don’t live in a democracy when one political party can purge another one from the ballots.
Okay, that’s an interesting thought, although there are two political parties in the US who are capable of preventing ballot access for smaller parties. Can RCV prevent both parties from purging others from the ballot? I don’t know, very rarely does anyone ever address this and it certainly doesn’t get addressed in this video. In fact Jimmy keeps this tweet in view for about 80 seconds and never even makes a reference to it directly. The only information in this video regarding the matter of ballot access in relation to RCV is an image of a pandering, impotent tweet. As for what Jimmy actually argues, let’s start from the beginning.
According to Jimmy: Well it’s [RCV] the thing that would get rid of the spoiler effect of the third party.
Absolutely wrong. I hate to break it to you, but if you’re a third party voter, you possess the power to spoil any election regardless of the voting system used. To spoil an RCV election here’s what you have to do. Step 1 is to cast a 1st choice vote for the alternative-left party candidate of your choice; either Green, Labor, Socialist, Marxist, Legal Weed, Rhino or whatever. Step 2 is to refrain from making any other rankings for this particular race. Step 3 is to repeat this process for all other down ballot races. When the results come in and the Democrats lose, step 4 is to sit back and prepare to be blamed for the Dems’ defeat. Following the presidential election of 2016, MSNBC literally argued that if all of Stein’s votes had gone to Clinton in some states then she would have won the election. Imagine how shocked these people will be when they realize that not all Green Party votes will necessarily transfer to the Democrats in an RCV election. The notion that RCV will eliminate the spoiler effect is built partially upon the faulty notion that all third party support is the result of protest votes.
According to Jimmy: So they add up all the votes and if nobody has 50%, they throw out the smallest vote getter.
This is a poor choice of words from Jimmy. In most cases what they do is take the votes for the candidate in last place and transfer them based on how those voters ranked the other candidates beyond their first choice. The only thing that gets truly thrown out are the exhausted ballots, where a voter has done nothing to specify a preference among the rest of the candidates in the election. The most popular type of exhausted ballot is a bullet vote, where a voter specifies a 1st choice option and then leaves every other candidate unranked. If the candidate that this person votes for doesn’t make it into the final recount round then their vote will be exhausted rendering their choice as one which is essentially ‘wasted’ in the traditional sense of the term. The number of exhausted ballots in some elections can be so large that no candidate truly ends up with a majority of support as seen in the 2018 election for Maine’s 2nd congressional district.
According to Jimmy: RCV makes democracy more fair and functional
Actually in a desire for greater accuracy this statement should be attributed to FairVote rather than Jimmy. And who are FairVote exactly? The best answer is that they are a propagandist advocacy group made up of what I would assume to be centrist, neoliberal Democrats whose mission is life is convince the world that RCV is the greatest electoral system ever devised by humankind. This involves ridiculous claims that RCV reduces negative campaigning, creates more choice for voters and produces undisputable majorities, without any voter shaming, or wasted votes. But none of that really matters, because RCV’s raison d’être is to eliminate the negative consequences of vote splitting. To be fair RCV does an effective job in this aim, largely due to FairVote’s extremely dedicated media campaign to espouse RCV as a remedy against 3rd party voter guilt. RCV is primarily targeted to 3rd party voters as a bargain where they can still vote for their favorite candidate, while upholding the two party system largely due to a collective fear of a really awful person winning an election. Despite all of this, we see Dore, a noted ‘progressive’, passively read FairVote’s information without even questioning its veracity.
According to Jimmy: It’s so complicated. I have to rank my choices
Umh, actually you don’t. If you only like one candidate, you can simply rank them first and leave the rest blank. Bullet voting has occurred in every single RCV election that has ever taken place.
According to Jimmy: (During his attempted restaurant menu analogy) Could you just give me two choices that are both shitty and poison. Cause at least it’s simple. That menu’s too complicated
So the decision regarding who will lead the executive branch of our federal government for 4 years is being compared to the choice of determining the food that one will consume for temporary subsistence. I’m just going to state that this may not be the best analogy that Dore could have constructed here.
According to Jimmy: …we can vote to replace Collins with a progressive independent & still rank a safe choice #2.
Given the scenario that Dore lays out, you’d be more likely to replace Maine senator Susan Collins with Mrs. Safe Choice #2, than the progressive independent. All Lisa Savage is doing here is helping the Democrats win the election. But then again I suppose that Sara Gideon is equally opposed to the candidacy of Collins and surely she is doing her part to convince her supporters to cast secondary votes for Savage, correct? I actually spent time scrolling through Gideon’s Twitter feed and she barely even recognizes Savage’s candidacy. Then again given how the RCV functions I don’t blame Gideon for this, since it would actually be to her advantage for Savage to finish in 3rd. The one problem with RCV, for which Jimmy will probably never mention, is that only the sub-rankings from the eliminated candidates will matter. If Savage does well enough to finish in 2nd place in this race, then all the secondary votes that her voters cast for Gideon will be rendered completely worthless. When a candidate comes forward and suggests to their supporters to cast secondary votes for another candidate, I think that there is a very subtle, tacit implication that they expect to finish in 3rd place and that they desire for their votes to be used in the service to defeat another candidate. I can’t imagine many Republicans or Democrats ever doing this, because they would rarely expect to be eliminated by the RCV process. Within the RCV system, Republicans and Democrats will campaign with the notion that they could win the election, while 3rd party candidates campaign with the aim not to be viewed as spoiler candidates, with the onus of filling out a full RCV ballot largely falling to the people who cast 1st choice votes for them. How do people not see that this system benefits the two-party duopoly?
According to Jimmy: In places that have RCV, you actually hear from candidates who have progressive policies, because it’s not as easy to exclude them.
What an excellent point! Everybody knows that 3rd party progressive candidates never get ballot access or any sort of measurable media exposure in plurality elections. On the subject of ballot access, it should be noted that RCV usually has no effect on the ballet access requirements coded into the law in most jurisdictions that use the system. In Maine for instance independent candidates for a US Senate seat have to gather 4000 petition signatures to get on the ballot. The implementation of RCV did not change this requirement for ballot access. The arguments for greater access usually center around ‘human behavior’. For instance, the RCV system ‘encourages’ more 3rd party candidates to get into the race and may even encourage more people to vote for them. In states where 3rd parties have to maintain qualified status based on the number of votes, this might be enough to convince Democrats and Republicans to reject RCV, but ultimately this is all that RCV can offer. RCV can make it easier for 3rd parties to satisfy the conditions for being a qualified party, but it still accomplishes very little in their desire for legitimacy. In an RCV election, it’s very apparent what role 3rd parties will play.
According to Jimmy: Despite what Gavin Newsom tells you, it ain’t complicated. It ain’t complicated, they’ll..., they break it down, they show… This is not complicated, rank choice voting.
Well of course RCV isn’t complicated when you’re not willing to talk about it with any real depth. Dore has done several videos on RCV and I don’t believe that he has ever once mentioned relatively simple concepts like bullet voting or exhausted ballots. And god forbid should Dore ever approach notions like non-monotonicity, which was seen in the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington, VT. In fact if you want to believe in the simplicity of RCV you should probably never google anything on the 2009 Burlington election, nor the 2010 District 10 Board of Supervisors race in San Francisco, that’d be a good one to avoid too.
According to Stef (Jimmy’s co-host): One of our supporters Dana said that in San Francisco when Gavin Newsom was running for mayor, they had RCV and almost lost to I think a Green Party member at 47% and Gavin came in at 52%.
So this is how the Jimmy Dore Show works. If someone messages them with an idea that sounds halfway reasonable and plays into their desired narrative, they’ll just run with it without bothering to do any fact checking. The election referenced above was the 2003 mayoral election in San Francisco which actually did not use RCV. It employed a traditional run-off. It was the run-off election that took place a month after the general election where the 52-47 split occurred. The subsequent mayoral election in 2007 did use RCV and Newsom won this race with 73% of vote with no votes being transferred. I highly doubt that Newsom’s experiences as a mayoral candidate influenced his views on RCV. Still this comment is almost the perfect way to end a video on RCV that offered shallow, unproven conjectures that were supported by nothing more than random, cherry-picked tweets and FairVote’s heavily biased rhetoric.