In the News
January 23, 2021
This article in The Globe: The Student News Site of Clayton High School by Kaitlyn Tran cites RepresentWomen's 2020 RCV report. Read an excerpt below.
In the current system where a candidate can win without a majority and even by a slim margin, RCV offers a method of voting that has the potential to more accurately represent constituent opinions. RCV can minimize what is dubbed the “spoiler” effect, when a popular candidate barely loses the election because other, less-popular candidates who had similar values split the vote.
This happened in the Massachusetts 4th District Democratic Congressional Primary where Jake Auchincloss, a candidate plagued with controversy who ran on a “pragmatic progressive” platform narrowly edged out the popular and highly progressive Jesse Mermell. The 9-way race had 3 other female candidates with similar progressive values to Mermell, and many believe this split Mermell’s vote and led her to lose with 21.4% of the vote to Auchincloss’s 22.4%.
RCV reduces the “spoiler effect” because it implores voters to grant their first choice preference to perhaps a less popular candidate who they like the most, instead of picking a single winner that is not their ideal candidate but has similar values and is more popular. Since the voter is ranking and not selecting a single winner, there’s more freedom to actually mark their favorite candidate in first place, instead of settling in an attempt to avoid the “spoiler effect.”
In addition, RCV has the benefit of pushing campaigns toward a more positive and uplifting culture. Political tactics like “mudslinging” are less likely to occur, since it can reflect poorly on candidate A’s ranking on a voter’s ballot when candidate A once attacked candidate B, the voter’s favorite candidate. Furthermore, RCV races could build coalitions between candidates of similar values, who would now be motivated to help each other in rankings, rather than the status quo of aligning candidates placing heavy emphasis on the issues that divide them in order to stand out. Elizabeth Warren in the Boston Globe advocates that this “replace[s] the politics of personal destruction with positive coalition.”
There are also less straightforward benefits that, although still need to be further researched, could potentially be widely concluded as an effect of RCV. RepresentWomen, a research advocacy 501(c)(3) organization, found that RCV has a positive impact on female and person of color representation in a decade-long analysis over 156 local level elections.
Read the full article here.
