Are you tired of negative political attacks flooding the airwaves every election season? Are you fed up with political polarization and gridlock in Washington? Do you feel like politics is broken?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be interested in a new documentary about improving democracy called Majority Rules.
Director AJ Schnack investigates the fascinating innovations Alaska implemented for its election process: open primaries and an instant runoff general election through ranked choice voting. Soon after the reforms were implemented in Alaska, the state’s longest-serving Congressman unexpectedly passed away, giving us a chance to see the results of the electoral reforms in practice. In short, the experience from Alaska shows that electoral reforms are a promising way to improve the nation’s political discourse and increase the power that voters have to hold politicians accountable.
The film is a must-see for anyone interested in improving democracy. Even those with deep knowledge about election reform efforts and proposals will learn something new. The film does a great job of collecting examples from around the country and offering various different perspectives about why reforming the way we do elections is so important.
The most interesting part of the film to me was seeing efforts to implement reforms like Alaska’s in other states. Usually, activists found that the two dominant parties were the biggest obstacles to change. The two parties do not want to give up the control they are able to exert over the political process, and electoral reforms do just that. But overcoming opposition from the two majority parties is a daunting challenge. Majority Rules was released before the 2024 general election took place, where electoral reforms efforts failed in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana. In all cases, at least one of the major parties opposed the efforts, and most often it was both major parties that opposed the efforts. Improving democracy is no easy task.
The one thing I wish the film had mentioned has to do with types of ranked choice voting. The particular method used in Alaska general elections is called instant runoff voting, where in each successive round, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped, and their votes are redistributed to other candidates based on the next preferred choice marked on the ballot. This method is a huge improvement over the current first-past-the-post method, but instant runoff has its flaws as well. Small tweaks, however, can improve ranked voting from a good method to a fantastic method.
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2022, Nobel laureate in economics and professor at Harvard Eric Maskin and law professor Edward Foley proposed a slight tweak to Alaska’s ranked voting system called “Total Vote Runoff”. Instead of eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-place votes each round, they suggest eliminating the candidate with the fewest total votes. This would give the election counting method much more desirable properties. Alternatively, another tweak that would also work would be Bottom Two Runoff – Instant Runoff Voting (BTR-IRV or “better IRV”). In this tweak, each round is a runoff between the two candidate with the fewest first-place votes; the winner of the head-to-head match-up based on all votes advances to the next round. Either of these tweaks would give ranked choice voting very desirable properties to make it most likely that moderate and consensus candidates win the election.
On second thought… perhaps it is best that the film did not get into the weeds of voting theory. We can leave that discussion to the election reform blogosphere. Instead, Majority Rules delivers a compelling illustration of why taking back our democracy is so important, and how we already have the tools to do so. We just need to do that hard work of bringing about the changes we want to see.