With more than a dozen Democrats already seeking the party’s nomination for the Ninth Congressional District and at least four in the Second District, advocates for ranked choice voting will seize on the opportunity to explain how that system is superior to the winner-take-all plurality approach.
Evanston took the lead on implementing ranked choice for its consolidated elections earlier this year, but – outside of a flag design contest – a primary is the ideal proving ground. It’s a leading reason for the attention given to Iowa’s presidential caucuses. At those events, partisans gather in a public space and physically move around the room to show their support for a given candidate. When one group is clearly not sufficient, those participants disperse and transfer allegiances.
On a paper ballot, voters rank candidates, assigning a priority value to each or leaving names blank at the point of indifference. If one candidate breaks 50% as everyone’s top choice, the tallying ends. But absent a majority, whichever option has the fewest top-choice votes is eliminated, and any ballots listing the last-place finisher as the top choice get added to those voters’ second choice.
In a crowded primary field, it’s easy to envision the voter torn between two or three choices but strongly opposed to one candidate. A ranked choice ballot would help those voters coalesce around a consensus. Then the general election would be a different story, with each party advancing one nominee for a conventional vote.
The 2014 Republican gubernatorial primary was a four-man race. Bruce Rauner won with 40.1%, Kirk Dillard was second at 37.2%, Bill Brady had 15.1% and Dan Rutherford got 7.6%. Altogether, there were only 819,710 votes, leaving Rauner nearly 81,000 shy of a majority. In a ranked choice system, the more than 185,000 people who backed Brady and Rutherford – more than 22% of the electorate – could’ve swayed the outcome, pushing Rauner over the line or bolstering Dillard into the majority.
Illinois actually has a Ranked-Choice and Voting Systems Task Force charged with evaluating options ahead of the 2028 presidential primary. That group’s final report was due March 1, 2024. In May that year, it gave itself a new deadline of June 30, 2025. (If that report exists, it’s not online.) Lawmakers routinely introduce legislation to further explore the concept, but broadly, the concept has struggled to find footing here, perhaps due to the threat it poses for established (entrenched?) political operations.
There are plenty of flaws with the current system, and even ranked choice wouldn’t solve issues with gerrymandered districts. But the Congressional races still offer at least a lesson in the discordance between the ways many people think about politics and the actual process for selecting representatives.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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