As the year comes to a close, we are approximately five weeks from the first votes of the 2020 election.  This post is to highlight one of the new features of this election — that several states will be using ranked choice voting.  (As described further below, Nevada will be using ranked-choice voting to allow early voters to participate in the caucuses.   Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming will be using ranked-choice voting in a party-run primary.  Maine will be using ranked-choice voting in a state-run primary.)

In the past, we have had something similar to ranked choice voting in some of the caucus states.  Typically, many of the caucus states allow attendees to realign after the first vote if their preferred candidate does not receive enough votes to qualify for a delegate.  Of course, when this process occurs at a caucus, the attendees have some idea of where the candidates currently stand and have the ability to negotiate delegate slots in exchange for moving as a bloc.  (Even at the handful of remaining caucus, the ability to make deals will be greatly reduced.  In the past, it was possible — for example — for Richardson supporters to move to Edwards in exchange for a pledge that one of the delegate slots would go to a Richardson supporter who would be a free agent at the county convention.  Under the new rules, the national delegate allocations are locked after the precinct convention significantly reducing the value of such delegate deals.)

Ranked choice voting requires voters to decide in advance whom they would support if their candidate is not viable.  For the most part, there has not been large support for moving to ranked choice voting in general elections in this country.  For a variety of reasons, the two major parties are more dominant in the U.S. than in most other countries.  (For example, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia all held parliamentary elections last year.  In those elections, the two main parties had a combined vote total of 67-76% of the vote.  By contrast, in the 2018 house elections, the two main parties had over 98% of the vote.  Even at the low point of the 1992 election, the two main parties combined for over 80% of the vote.)  The absence of significant votes for third-party candidates means that — most of the time — the winning candidate in U.S. elections gets a majority of the vote in their district.  (Again for comparison, in the 2019 elections abroad, the winning candidate only had a plurality in about one-third of the districts in the United Kingdom, and about two-thirds of the districts in Canada and Australia.  By contrast, combining the House, the Senate, and state-wide races, the winning candidate in the 2018 elections in the U.S. only had a plurality in 28 contests — less than five percent of the races. )

In practice, the different states will not be using ranked choice voting in the same way.  Nevada will only be using ranked-choice voting for those voting in advance (rather than those attending the caucus).  The Nevada Party will be sharing the advance vote with the precinct caucus chairs who will use the advance vote in combination with the vote of those physically attending the caucus to determine who is eligible to receive delegates.  If votes are cast (in advance) for a candidate who does not have a viable caucus, the rankings of the viable candidates will be used to determine which viable candidate will get those votes.  Meanwhile those attending the caucus will have to move from the non-viable to the viable caucuses.  (It is possible for multiple non-viable caucuses to consolidate into a viable caucus.  The problem with this is not knowing the “second choices” of the advance voters which could make a difference in whether a combined caucus is viable.)

For votes cast in party-run primaries (or state-run in the case of  Maine) that are using ranked-choice voting, the process appears to be that the trailing candidates will be eliminated one-by-one with their votes reassigned based on voters’ ranking of the candidates until all remaining candidates are viable (above 15%).  Presumably, this will be done on a congressional district basis and a state-wide basis (except in a state like Alaska or Wyoming that only has one congressional district) as delegates are awarded based on both the result by congressional district and state-wide.

It will be interesting to see how the use of ranked choice voting impacts the delegate allocation.  Most of the international experience with ranked choice voting (or it’s close cousin, single transferable vote) is in areas where you need to win a majority (ranked choice voting) or receive a certain percentage (single transferable vote in multi-member districts) to win the seat.  In most of these elections, the candidate who is first (or in multi-member district would be in a position that would win a seat if the top X candidates were elected) wins in the vast majority of cases.  Of course, that includes a significant number of candidates who were barely short of a majority (or quota in a multi-member district) and had a significant lead over the next closest candidate.  When the margin is closer and a candidate needs to get a significant number of votes to be elected, the trailing candidate sometimes is able to win.

Translating that experience to the rules for winning delegates, my expectation is that it is unlikely that a candidate that gets fewer than 10% of the “first preference” vote will be able to gain enough votes when preferences from the lower candidates are redistributed to get to 15%.  My hunch is that most of the “second” preferences will go to candidates who already are viable.   The close call will be those candidates who have between 13% and 15% of the first preference vote.  Will they be able to get the extra 1-2% needed to meet the threshold?  Raising the difficulty is that many of the ranked-choice states are later in the process after candidates have dropped out.  It would be one thing in New Hampshire used ranked-choice votes where you could have 15-20% of the vote spread over multiple candidates who get less than 10% of the first preference vote.  But by Maine (and the later party-run primary states), the field will probably have narrowed and you might have a total of less than 10% of the vote to be redistributed before reaching the candidates who have 13% of the vote.

In any case, the use of ranked choice voting will be a new experience for the media (unless they paid close attention to Maine in 2018 or the handful of major cities that use ranked-choice voting for local elections).  It will be almost as interesting to see how the media handle the initial returns from Maine (will they note the tentative nature of their estimates given the future redistribution of preferences) or will they pretend that their estimates are set in stone.