Change doesn’t start at the national level

While everyone was paying attention to the presidential election, Maine quietly made history — not when it joined three states in legalizing marijuana, but when it became the first state to adopt ranked choice voting for all elections.

Ranked choice voting, or RCV, is a system where voters rank their candidates, starting with their first pick and working down. If any candidate has over 50 percent of the first choice vote, they immediately win. But if no one wins a majority, then the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated, and every vote cast for them is transferred to the candidate ranked second on each ballot. This process continues until a candidate has a majority. It’s a superior system — and Princeton should adopt it, too.

Under current USG rules, we use the more familiar “one vote per race” format for most positions. In 2014, this necessitated a runoff procedure, which created a lot of additional hassle for the student government. Not only would RCV prevent this in the future, but it would also force voters to learn about more of the candidates and not just find one they like enough.

Here’s an example of the process: imagine a USG election where the frontrunner wins 45 percent of the vote, the next candidate wins 35 percent, and a third wins 20 percent. There is no majority winner, so the third-place candidate would be eliminated. If the voters for the third place candidate had all given a second choice split 50-50 among the other two, the original frontrunner would win with 55 percent of the vote. This splitting of the vote is the “instant runoff.”

Among other benefits, that majority helps give the candidate an effective mandate. We’re seeing problems with that now on the national stage, after Trump won the election without even a plurality of the popular vote. In fact, in four of the last seven presidential elections, the winner had less than 50 percent of the vote.

The lack of an instant runoff also creates a system in which parties must choose a single candidate. If the US ran on RCV, Bernie could have run in the general election and asked his supporters to list Clinton as their second choice. Any number of Republicans could have done something similar. There was frustration this year with the candidates picked by both major parties. RCV solves this problem, eliminating the need to pick a single candidate for a party.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that RCV is unpopular in Washington: it weakens political parties. Here at Princeton, however, we don’t have political parties, so I see no reason not to implement RCV for every elected position. Some clubs and teams already use it, to great effect.

Change doesn’t start at the national level. It starts at the smallest of local elections. If Princeton wants its students to be civically engaged, switching to a system of voting that encourages that is a good place to start.