Paul Bass Photo
Dem duo: RCV advocates Jonathan Perloe and Steven Winter at WNHH FM.
New Yorkers did something revolutionary this week: They voted for the candidate they wanted for elected office. All the candidates they wanted. In order of preference.
Will New Haven and Connecticut voters one day get the same opportunity?
If Jonathan Perloe and Steve Winter and their allies can convince enough state lawmakers … then, yes.
Perloe and Winter (a New Haven alder) work with a statewide coalition called Voter Choice Connecticut.
The group is pushing for the state to institute “ranked choice voting” (RCV) in elections. That system allows voters to choose more than one candidate for an elected office when at least three candidates are on the ballot. They rank their choices in order of preference.
The idea behind the process:Voters don’t have to worry about “the lesser of two evils.” They don’t have to avoid choosing the person they most support in order to choose a lesser-favored candidate to stop someone they despise from getting elected. They can pick their top choice first — and still makes sure their vote counts, by also selecting another candidate they support somewhat over candidates they want to try to stop from winning.
Here’s how it works: If no candidate receives 50 percent, then the last-place candidate is eliminated. That candidate’s voters’ second-choice votes then get added to the tallies. If that gives a candidate 50 percent of the vote, the election’s finished. If not, the same process continues to a third round, and beyond if necessary, until someone reaches 50 percent and is declared the winner.
The idea is not only that people don’t have to worry about “wasting” votes. They also become more engaged in elections. And candidates have an incentive to focus on issues rather than attacks, in order to avoid alienating supporters of their opponents who made choose them second or third.
Also, RCV “makes sure the person who wins has majority” support, Perloe notes. In Maine, for instance, a candidate for Congress won the first round of a 2018 election with less than 50 percent support in a three-way race; it turned out that more of the third-place candidate’s voters preferred the other candidate, who then prevailed in the second round.
New York City just held its first mayoral primary in decades using that system on Tuesday. By initial accounts, it went smoothly. (The city had RCV in the mid-20th century.)
Twenty other cities and states have instituted RCV in recent years.
“Ireland,” Perloe noted, “has been doing it for a century.”
While New Haven doesn’t have ranked-choice elections for elected office, it has experimented with the process in making two public discussions over the past 16 months: In one case to choose the color of the rebuilt Grand Avenue Bridge, the other to settle on a new name for the School Formerly Known As Columbus.
Perloe and Winter discussed the quest to bring RCV to Connecticut during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Their group and allies convinced the state House of Representatives in 2019 to pass a law launching a study of how to bring RCV to Connecticut. The bill didn’t make it to the Senate.
The study bill didn’t make it out of committee this year, as pro-democracy forces focused on other election-reform measures. Advocates hope to push for its passage next year.
RCV tends to draw support from Democrats and opposition from Republicans. In Connecticut, no Republicans voted for the study bill in 2019.
Perloe insisted that either party can benefit from RCV. In the 1992 presidential election, Republican President George Bush I may have won against Democrat Bill Clinton if the second choices of independent Ross Perot’s voters were counted in a second round of RCV. Similarly, in 2000, Al Gore may have prevailed against President George Bush II if the Florida voters who backed third-party candidate Ralph Nader had their second choices counted in a second round of RCV.
“This is not a liberal-versus-conservative thing,” Perloe said. “It favors voters.”
Winter noted that Denise Merrill, a leading election-reform advocate, has announced that she will not run for reelection in 2022 for Connecticut secretary of the state. “We lost a champion,” Winter said. As for candidates running to replace her, “We’ll be sure to ask them” where they stand on ranked choice voting.
You can watch the full WNHH-FM interview with Perloe and Winter in the above video.