This year a citizen initiative may be placed on the ballot that, if passed, would permit voters in future elections to vote not only for their first choice for a given office but vote for alternates if their first choice does not receive more than 50 percent of the votes cast for a given office. In other words, the voter may “rank” those seeking office.
A few OpEds have been written to date both supporting and opposing the proposal. The principal concern voiced to date is whether the proposal is constitutional under Article V, Part First, Section 3 of the Maine Constitution, which speaks of the election of the governor “in case of a choice by a plurality of all of the votes returned.”
The majority of commentators have addressed the question in terms of policy considerations, or assumed consequences, or feared unintended consequences. I am aware of only one commentator who has suggested that the proposal simply cannot meet its intended objective, but he did not fully explain why it will not work.
The goal of ranked-choice voting rests on the notion that if a candidate does not receive a majority of the votes cast for the office for which he or she is running, it would be more democratic if the person who appears to be supported as the “alternate” choice by a majority of the voters be elected to office instead of the person receiving only a plurality of the votes cast.
This notion may have some appeal, but unfortunately for its supporters it simply won’t fulfill the goal. This conclusion was reported by the Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow in 1951 and is referred to as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Arrow demonstrated the theorem mathematically. This theorem, also known as the General Possibility Theorem, or Arrow’s Paradox, states that, when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no rank-order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a communitywide (complete and transitive) ranking.
The theorem is described in Wikipedia and discussed at length in chapter seven of a book written by Leo Katz titled “Why the Law is So Perverse.” Katz demonstrates through a series of examples that “it is generally possible, for any given set of candidates and any fixed set of preferences, to find a method that generates whatever ranking we want. The actual outcome of the election is as much a function of the method used to count votes as of the preferences of the voters. By strategically choosing the right voting method, we can thus generate whatever outcome we want.”
So much for enhancing the democratic process!
During the time signatures were being collected in support of the petition, a meeting of about 35 persons from around the state was held in Portland to muster support for the petition. A guest speaker who was represented to be an expert on ranked-choice voting spoke urging support for the measure. When asked what his response was to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, he stated he had never heard of it and had no answer. And no response has been put forth to date, now about one year later. It would appear there is none.
At least with the current system that allows for winning by a plurality vote, we know the person receiving the most votes is favored by the greatest number of voters and the outcome is not intentionally or unintentionally “rigged.” Long before Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, this was the conclusion of Maine voters in 1880 when the Maine Constitution was amended as quoted above to allow for plurality voting. The amendment was enacted after the Legislature, after an election where no majority of the votes was received, elected for governor a candidate receiving fewer votes than the candidate who received the plurality of votes.
In the pursuit of a more perfect democracy, we should not engage in wishful thinking.
Rendle A. Jones is a lawyer practicing in Camden.