Diego Veronica Torres
Professor Althouse
Communications 2, Section 13
December 4, 2017
Ranked Choice Voting
The current electoral system of the United States has been in use since 1787. Since then a lot has changed in politics and its nor working any more. The United States constitution calls for the election of representatives and senators to be decided by a plurality of the vote and for the election of the president to be decided by the vote of a designated group called the electoral college. The way in which the American public elect their government officials is outdated and fails to represent the political views of the majority of the American public. 69% of all Americans are not happy with the current way they elect their officials (YouGov), with the majority of people in the survey feeling less enthusiastic about politics after Donald Trump won the presidency. The electoral system currently in use in the U.S. makes it very hard to elect representatives outside of the Democrat and Republican parties allowing for only a small part of the American political views to be heard on the congress floor, additionally the electoral college, currently used to elect the president of the United States is disproportionally representing small states, electoral college votes are distributed by population but votes from bigger states are taken away and given to small states to make it “more fair”. The United States government needs to amend its constitution and rewrite how the president and all congress members are elected to office. Ranked choice voting is a better electoral system that we have because it will get rid of the current hardships we face today as a nation like low turn out rates, it will make sure that every single opinion is heard and represented in our government, and it will alleviate the polarized political debate.
On the current electoral system of the United States the candidates win with a simple plurality instead of winning with a majority. The plurality system engrains a fear of voting for the wrong candidates in many of the citizens to the point where constituents do not vote for the person they believe would be the best for office but for the lesser of two evils or for the one with a chance to win. This is called the spoiler effect, the spoiler effect occurs whenever there are two candidates with a similar ideology that will split the vote of their base, causing them to not win the election. An example of this would be on the election of 1992. Bill Clinton, George H W Bush and Ross Perot were running to become president. Bush and Perot shared right leaning opinions and split the republican vote with 37% of the votes going to Bush and 19% to Perot (New York Times). Had Perot not run for office and all right leaning votes were transferred to Bush, he would have easily won the popular vote by more than six percent.
This split of vote elected a president that the majority of Americans did not want to see in office. This fear of electing the opposite party with your vote has made it very difficult for third party candidates to run for office because the people have adapted to strategic voting. The lack of different parties in congress makes it very hard for every single person to be represented on the congress floor because third parties and independent representatives are not elected.
Ranked – Choice voting system is a more effective way to choose who will represent the voices of the American people. Ranked-choice is easy to understand and has been proven to work in several cities of the united states and other countries such as Australia. Ranked choice voting works by letting the voter rank the candidates, “1” being their favorite candidate and the last number being their least favorite candidate. If on the first round of voting none of the candidates surpass a majority, that is more than 50% than all of the votes that went to the candidate with the least amount of votes will be redistributed to their second choice, and that process will continue until a candidate surpasses 50%(Fair Vote).
The opposition to this voting system claim that ranked-choice will skew the results to someone not favored by the majority because its “complex” and very hard to understand (New York Times.) While it is true that the American voters will need to re-adjust to the way they will vote it is not very hard to understand the new process of voting, ranked-choice voting has been the standard in many American cities and was recently established as the voting system for Maine, additionally ranked-choice is also in place in big countries such as in Australia. Ranked-choice is a system that a lot of Americans have already experienced and will raise the voter turn out on future elections. When the ranked-choice voting system was introduced in Minneapolis in 2012 the voter turn out jumped from the average of 20% on previous mayoral elections to 33% on the election of 2013 and the majority of the voters approved of the elected mayor. The higher voter turn out was due to the increase in candidate choice and the diversity of political parties (The Uptake.) The recent victory for ranked-choice voting in Minneapolis is a clear testament that the American people are able and willing to adjust the way in which they vote to make it a fairer process to all.
Ranked choice voting also increases civility and policy focused campaigns. In the past election of 2016 there were many claims of incivility, indecency and a lack of focus on the policies the presidential candidates were trying to advance. According to google trends some of the most googled keywords related to the election were: nasty woman, Hillary Clinton emails, and Hollywood access tape. All of this memorable topics from the 2016 election are a testament of what is wrong with our current electoral system. Because the candidates only have one more competitor all they have to do is make sure to look like the best option. Many candidates spend the majority of their budget making their opponent look bad rather than making the policies they are advocating for look like the best solution to the problems the nation currently faces. Implementing ranked-choice voting system will make all candidates to behave in a manner that would make their ideals shine rather than making their opponents look bad. They will be able to demonstrate that they are experienced and knowledgeable enough to carry the title of being an elected official.
The United States of America is currently undergoing a political revolution, more and more people are unhappy with their current elected officials. Approval ratings for all three branches of government are at record lows with congress only having 13% of approval. These low approval rates are mostly attributed to the lack of representation some citizens experience in our government. There are no independent nor third party representatives in the House of representatives and there are only two independent senators in the senate. This is a problem because around 56% of all American citizens do not feel like they belong to the two parties that control the American government. By implementing ranked choice voting, Americans will have more choices and will not have to worry about the spoiler effect causing an increase on the party diversity represented in the three branches of government as it has been seen on the recent Minneapolis elections.
The United States government needs to act on the current problems that the electoral process has; it fails to represent all opinions of the American citizens, it engrains a fear of voting for the wrong candidate and it encourages dirty campaign tricks to win the office. The current problems the electoral system faces are being felt by every single American and a solution needs to occur. The congress should enact a policy that would establish ranked choice as the electoral system for all federal elections and each state should look into the possibility of implementing it in their local elections.
I used a lot of techniques to try to keep the audience entertained and interested in my topic. Choosing the types of arguments that I’d like to use and also choosing they were going to be told was a very strategic process. My opening statement consisted on the definition of dystopia, I started my speech this way because I wanted the audience to be surprised by something that is often regarded as not being real to later explain how it relates to the topic. By connecting the word dystopia to the current electoral system I was able to make sure that the audience understand the gravity of the effects not having a good electoral system has in society. Throughout the speech I used mainly three types of arguments; example, analogy, and correlation. Correlation was the first type of argument that was used, at the beginning of the speech I used a figure that displayed how many Americans did not vote because they did not feel happy about the way the government is running and later correlated it to how low turn out rates show that the American people do not feel content with the way Americans elect their officials because they are not representing their ideals. I used this type of argument because according to the text book Arguments and Arguing, the audience is more likely to believe a claim if it has a cause and an effect.
Additionally I implemented a lot of arguments by examples. The first one was when I compared how ranked choice has worked extremely well in Australian, because Australia and the United States have a lot in common such as their big population size, the high level of diversity and extensive territory, by explaining how ranked choice voting has worked so well in Australia and how supportive of it Australians are, the audience would be more likely to support my argument.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/166985/dissatisfied-gov-system-works.aspx
http://www.fairvote.org/rcv/#rcvbenefits
http://theuptake.org/2014/11/25/special-report-ranked-choice-voting-the-minneapolis-experiment-2/
Types of Arguments:
Argument by example (many people are unhappy with trump), analogy (it has been working on different cities, states, and countries) Correlation (If there is low turn out rate in elections than it means that the citizens are not interested on who represents them)
Types of Appeals: Emotional(tried to induce anger to make the audience interested in the topic) and logical (Approval ratings clearly represents who is happy with what and if we have a problem why wont you want to fix it)
I told some examples in form of a story to appeal to make my speech more memorable