The Boston Globe has described the race among Democrats to fill Rep. Niki Tsongas’ Third District congressional seat as the most competitive in a generation, and with the outcome still in doubt Wednesday morning as this paper was being prepared to go to press, that seems an apt description. The upside has been the amazing diversity of backgrounds and experience among the 10 Democratic candidates running for office. But as Harvard’s own results show, the downside is the lack of a clear winner with a mandate he or she can take to voters in the fall election. With a lack of clearly communicated policy differences, the Democratic race became instead a contest of identities: of life stories, gender, ethnicity, and economic backgrounds. Vote tallies Wednesday morning suggest that the winner is unlikely to have earned more than 22 percent of the total Democratic primary vote, and the margin of victory could be less than a single percentage point.
The result makes a convincing argument for an alternative means of electing candidates that’s been in the news lately: ranked choice voting.
As described by Voter Choice Massachusetts, an organization that advocates ranked choice voting for the state, here’s how it works. Voters rank the candidates for an office as their first, second, third—and so on—choices. RCV ballots are counted in a series of rounds. First, all the first choices are counted, and if any candidate has a majority (more than half) of the votes, that candidate wins. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then the last-place candidate is eliminated and that candidate’s votes automatically get added to the second choice listed on those ballots. The process then repeats as many times as is necessary for a candidate to reach a majority of votes.
Advocates say RCV is a method that will reliably produce a candidate who can claim support from at least 50 percent of the electorate, a far better result than what’s likely for Third District candidates in this week’s primary. The system allows voters to weigh pluses and minuses of a broader slate of candidates. It eliminates the split among like-minded constituencies, which can in turn help to elect more diverse candidates, as the Globe argued in an August 7 editorial. Maine and the city of Cambridge already use it; Massachusetts should give it try. The Third District race shows its time has come.
For more, see:
- Voter Choice Massachusetts, (https://bit.ly/2Q6SKS8)
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The Boston Globe, “For better elections, give ranked-choice voting a chance,” Aug. 7, 2018,
(https://bit.ly/2NQVmC2)
