Bring RCV to City Elections
What's good enough for New York is good enough for Chicago.
Tomorrow Chicagoans will go to the polls to choose between Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson in our runoff election for Mayor. While they offer starkly different visions for the city, both candidates performed well in the first round of the race back in February, earning a combined 54% of the vote. Put differently, however, nearly half of Chicago voters opted for someone else. What if they didn’t have to?
In the past few posts, I’ve covered various aspects of our elections and how to make them more competitive so politicians are responsive to the public. Today we’ll wrap up this series on election reform with one more suggestion - ranked-choice voting.
What is ranked-choice voting?
The way we vote in elections today is pretty simple - you have a list of candidates to vote for, and you pick one. That’s it. Somebody tallies up all the votes, and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. In city elections, a runoff election follows if no candidate gets a 50%+1 majority in round one, but in those instances it’s still straightforward - whichever two candidates got the most votes get to advance.
Ranked-choice voting is different. Rather than selecting one candidate to vote for, you rank every candidate from favorite to least-favorite. Three candidates, rank them 1-2-3; ten candidates, rank them 1 to 10; and so on. Someone then tallies up all the first place votes to see if anyone got a majority. If so, they win! If not, we then drop the last placed candidate, re-allocate those votes to the last placed candidate based on whomever each voter selected as their second choice, and count again. This gets repeated until you have a majority winner.
This has a few advantages over the basic “whoever gets the most votes wins” type system. In a basic one-on-one matchup, nothing changes. But if you have more than two candidates on the ballot, you might like more than one. Or you might be indifferent about two and really hate the third. Ranking the candidates instead of picking one lets you outline your actual preferences more clearly.
Why this matters in Chicago
Our last two mayoral elections provide a pretty great example of how this could make a difference. In 2019, we had fourteen candidates on the official ballot in round one. Fourteen! Of those, Of those, eleven candidates got at least 1% of the vote, and seven candidates had a plurality in at least one ward. Suffice it to say it was a wide field. The two candidates that advanced to the runoff, Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle, had only 17.5% and 16% of the vote, respectively. This year’s election saw eight candidates with at least 1% of the vote and five candidates (who each received at least 9% of the vote) winning at least one ward. In both instances, a significant share of voters (66% and 46%, respectively) opted for somebody who didn’t make the runoff. I imagine a significant portion of these voters had a strong preference between Lightfoot and Preckwinkle or between Vallas and Johnson - but they also likely had some preferences between all of the other candidates in the field, too. With RCV, those preferences would matter too, and we’d know for sure that whomever wins the election really does have the most support.
Ranked-choice voting also eliminates the risk of ‘spoilers,’ where a candidate with more obscure support ends up throwing the election towards a different candidate (think Ralph Nader in 2000). This is relevant in that 2019 mayoral race too - with some claiming that Bill Daley’s chances were spoiled by attorney Jerry Joyce, who pulled in around 7% of the vote from Chicagoans that could’ve been likely to vote for Daley otherwise. Similarly, incumbents facing more than one challenger are often able to survive since the challengers split the anti-incumbent vote. We’ve also seen examples of ‘fake spoilers,’ like when Mike Madigan, running in a heavily Latino district against Jason Gonzales, allegedly got two other candidates with Latino-sounding names to run in an effort to diffuse support for Gonzales. With ranked-choice voting, these things wouldn’t matter. If you liked Daley and Joyce more than the other candidates, you could say so. If you prefer any challenger to the incumbent, you could say so. If you preferred any Latino candidate to Madigan, you could say so.
You also end up with more consensus, moderate winners. In a wide field, the candidates that tend to succeed are often those with a strong bloc of voters (for example, Brandon Johnson’s support from the CTU this election) but not necessarily universal appeal. With RCV, those blocs won’t get to guarantee their candidate does well - you need a candidate who can win a majority of the public, not just get a strong minority and hope nobody else does better.
Lastly - it would change the tenor of our elections. One of the aspects of the wide fields I do appreciate is that in a large field, candidates can’t simply tell you why you should vote against someone else; they actually have to give you reasons to vote for them. This changes very, very quickly when we advance to the runoff and the field is narrowed down to two - the steady barrage of attacks over the past few weeks over whether Brandon Johnson really wants to defund the police or whether Paul Vallas is a secret Republican stand in pretty stark contrast to the productive platforms and visions of governing both candidates portrayed in the first round. Negative ads are common in US elections because in a one-on-one contest, they are quite effective. With RCV, however, you again need to give voters a reason to choose you - if not first, then at least as their second or third choice - and attacking your opponent is as much a slam dunk as it is in a runoff. I tend to think that both elections and our civic discourse are better when they’re not just focused on fearmongering and attacking opponents, and RCV seems like it would help move us in the right direction on that front.
How real is this concept?
One final point to emphasize is that this is not some pie-in-the-sky concept some political scientists just dreamed up. New York City just used ranked-choice voting in their mayoral primaries to select Mayor Eric Adams in 2021! Other cities including San Francisco, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Santa Fe do as well. Maine has used ranked-choice voting in state and federal elections since 2016, and Alaska voted to adopt RCV via referendum in 2020.
Closer to home, last November the city of Evanston just approved ranked-choice voting for their city elections in a referendum with an overwhelming 82% of voters in favor, becoming the first Illinois municipality to adopt it. Beginning in 2025 their mayor, city council, and city clerk will be elected via ranked-choice voting. In February, progressive Alderman Matt Martin (47th ward) introduced a resolution calling for public hearings on adopting RCV in Chicago. While unlikely to lead to anything in the near-term, this at least highlights both interest in and legitimacy of the concept at a city level. Several good government groups, including Reform for Illinois and FairVote Illinois, have been behind these efforts - I encourage you to give them your attention and support.
The Bottom Line
Ranked-choice voting is a better way to elect politicians that our current system for city elections. We should adopt it in Chicago.