The Editorial Board of The Washington Post has endorsed ranked-choice voting in a column asking voters to “Put ranked-choice voting at the top of your list.”
Endorsements about electoral reforms from the media are important. News organizations and journalists are sometimes reluctant to endorse electoral reforms, or they say they don’t think such reforms will help very much. And I sometimes worry that it is because news does better in a polarized and charged political environment. News articles get more engagement when they describe shocking negative attacks that candidates make toward each other, or politicians taking actions that make readers feel outrage and resent. Although such a political environment is bad for democracy, it can be good for news article engagement. While ideally a lot of politics should be boring, a boring politics also means less engagement with the news.
The Editorial Board explained the case well: “There is no one trick to fix American democracy — but implementing ranked-choice voting in primary and general elections around the country could help. This reform is on the ballot in several states this year, as well as in D.C. It deserves to pass.” And the piece did an excellent job of backing up this claim with the evidence about past successes of RCV, as well as past cases without ranked voting that led to spoilers or candidates winning with a quite small percentage of votes. In D.C., they point out, “forcing candidates to compete for unaffiliated votes could shake up the town’s insulated Democratic establishment.”
This November, RCV proposals will be on the ballot across the country, including D.C., Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon. Electoral reforms including RCV are the most concrete step that can be taking to improve our political discourse, thereby moving to fix our broken political system. As the Editorial Board excellently summarized: “Though ranked-choice voting is no panacea, even just a little more moderation, independence and civil campaigning could go a long way.”