logo

Ranked Choice Voting Is Already Fixing The Sky High Incumbency Rate in Congress

image
Created: 16 November, 2018
Updated: 21 November, 2022
2 min read

Congress has had abysmally low approval ratings– which have averaged well below 40%– since the 1970s, years before the first millennial was even born yet. Since 2008 Congress' approval ratings have averaged below 20%, dipping as low as the single digits.

Yet paradoxically, according to OpenSecrets:

"Few things in life are more predictable than the chances of an incumbent member of the U.S. House of Representatives winning reelection. With wide name recognition, and usually an insurmountable advantage in campaign cash, House incumbents typically have little trouble holding onto their seats—as this chart shows."

It may very well be the case that popular, reform-minded candidates have too much in common with third party and independent candidates, who are invariably anti-establishmentarian, and these "minor" candidates split enough votes from challengers to keep incumbents in their seats for another two years– or six years in the case of U.S. Senators.

In a scenario like this, even though more voters prefer the challenger to the incumbent, the traditional "choose one" system of voting "spoils" the result by forcing some voters to choose between a compromise vote for a major party challenger and a "pure" or "principled" vote for a third party or independent candidate.

The media refers to these minor candidates (like Ross Perot, The Reform Party's presidential candidate in 1992, or Ralph Nader, the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2000) as "spoilers," but it would be more accurate to attribute vote spoiling to the "choose one" system of voting itself. By changing the system to a more sophisticated one, ranked choice voting advocates say we can get results that more accurately reflect more of the electorate.

In one form of ranked choice voting called Instant Runoff Ranked Choice Ballots, voters rank the candidates in order of preference, and if their preferred candidate gets fewer votes than the rest, their vote will count toward their second choice in an automatic runoff.

If that candidate is eliminated in the second round of tallies, then their vote counts toward their third choice, and so on… until a winner is selected who has both core and broad support.

IVP Existence Banner

This fixes a voting process that in most places puts voters in a classic prisoner’s dilemma scenario right out of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash’s principles of game theory.

It may be that prisoner's dilemma that results in the confoundingly consistently high congressional incumbency rates, despite consistently abysmally low congressional approval ratings.

Ranked choice voting could change that. And in Maine where it's just been tried for the first time– it is.

In 2018's midterms Maine was the first state to experiment with ranked choice voting for a U.S. House election.

In Maine's 2nd Congressional District, incumbent GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin received the most votes in the first round of tabulations, but after the instant runoff eliminated last place candidates and awarded those ballots to the voters' second choice, Poliquin's challenger– Democratic State Rep. Jared Golden– won.

Latest articles

votes
Wyoming Purges Nearly 30% of Its Voters from Registration Rolls
It is not uncommon for a state to clean out its voter rolls every couple of years -- especially to r...
27 March, 2024
-
1 min read
ballot box
The Next Big Win in Better Election Reform Could Come Where Voters Least Expect
Idaho isn't a state that gets much attention when people talk about politics in the US. However, this could change in 2024 if Idahoans for Open Primaries and their allies are successful with their proposed initiative....
21 March, 2024
-
3 min read
Courts
Why Do We Accept Partisanship in Judicial Elections?
The AP headline reads, "Ohio primary: Open seat on state supreme court could flip partisan control." This immediately should raise a red flag for voters, and not because of who may benefit but over a question too often ignored....
19 March, 2024
-
9 min read
Nick Troiano
Virtual Discussion: The Primary Solution with Unite America's Nick Troiano
In the latest virtual discussion from Open Primaries, the group's president, John Opdycke, sat down ...
19 March, 2024
-
1 min read
Sinema
Sinema's Exit Could Be Bad News for Democrats -- Here's Why
To many, the 2024 presidential primary has been like the movie Titanic - overly long and ending in a disaster we all saw coming from the start. After months of campaigning and five televised primary debates, Americans are now faced with a rematch between two candidates polling shows a majority of them didn’t want....
19 March, 2024
-
7 min read