Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild ask: Should we switch all U.S. elections to ranked choice voting? This type of voting is completely different from the status quo, and although many regions have swapped over, there are mathematical and logistical hurdles that give some experts pause.
As always, to dig in, our hosts invited two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, they aim to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Their guests this week are Deb Otis, director of research and policy for Fair Vote, a nonprofit that works on election reform, and David McCune, a professor of mathematics at William Jewell College in Missouri.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. New episodes drop on Wednesdays. You can also subscribe to Entanglements on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Brooke Borel: Hi, Anna.
Anna Rothschild: Hi, Brooke.
Brooke Borel: I have a clip to play for you.
Anna Rothschild: Ooo.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. You live in New York City, so I think you’ll recognize these two voices.
Zohran Mamdami: Hey.
Brad Lander: Hey. Good morning.
Zohran Mamdami: How’s it going?
Brad Lander: Please go second.
Zohran Mamdami: No, I insist you go second.
Brad Lander: How about I go first and you go second?
Zohran Mamdami: Well…
Anna Rothschild: Oh, I know what this is. This is Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, isn’t it, in a political campaign ad?
Brooke Borel: Yes, this was an ad they aired back in June, when they were running against each other in the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City. At the time, they were both lagging in the polls behind Andrew Cuomo, the former New York State governor.
Anna Rothschild: Right. And then they decided to try something pretty unconventional.
Brad Lander: Early voting starts tomorrow, and we both know what we need to do to save our city from Andrew Cuomo. Do you want to tell them?
Zohran Mamdami: You go first.
Brad Lander: No, you go first.
Zohran Mamdami: Let’s do it together.
Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdami: We’re cross endorsing.
Brad Lander: In New York City, we have ranked choice voting. That means you can rank up to five candidates for mayor.
Zohran Mamdami: Brad and I are officially telling our supporters, rank me number one, rank Brad number two.
Brad Lander: Rank me number one, rank Zohran number two. Let’s send Andrew Cuomo…
Zohran Mamdami: …back to the suburbs.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: You’re listening to Entanglements, the show where we dig into some of the thorniest debates in science and try to find common ground. And today, we’re talking about ranked choice voting. I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.
Brooke Borel: And Anna, as a New Yorker, you must be familiar with ranked choice voting already.
Anna Rothschild: For sure. So we’ve been using it for certain elections, like the mayoral primary, since 2021.
Brooke Borel: What does it actually look like when you get to the ballot box?
Anna Rothschild: Basically, when you fill out your ballot, instead of having to pick one candidate, you can list up to five candidates you like in order of your preference. And this way, candidates beyond your top choice get some love.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, exactly. And there are different ways to do ranked choice voting. But most commonly, this approach allows for what’s called an instant runoff.
Anna Rothschild: Mmhm.
Brooke Borel: So if no one has the majority of the first choice preferences, you eliminate whoever is in last place — that is, whoever had the fewest first choice preferences — and then redistribute the remaining choices on those ballots to the other candidates. You keep going and going until you have a clear winner.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly, and this is quite different from how we typically vote, at least in the U.S. right?
Brooke Borel: Right. So take the presidential election. Voters have two choices — sometimes three — and they can only vote for one candidate. And whoever gets the most votes wins. That’s called plurality voting.
Anna Rothschild: Well, except in the U.S., we also have the electoral college, which is its own thing.
Brooke Borel: Yes, details details. Good point. We do have the popular vote that is plurality voting, but the race is actually determined by the electoral college. But let’s focus on ranked choice voting, which is totally different from both of those approaches. So ranked choice is gaining popularity. It’s used in a few countries, but we’re going to focus our conversation today on the U.S. Here, it’s used for some elections in Alaska and Maine, and also dozens of counties and cities across the country. And it may be making a difference in who gets elected.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I mean, I know that in New York’s recent mayoral primary race, the ranked choice voting might have actually made a difference: Between the Mamdani and Lander co-endorsement, and also by encouraging voters not to rank Cuomo at all, Zohran Mamdani ultimately won the primary. But Brooke, what does this have to do with science?
Brooke Borel: Good question. So there’s actually quite a bit of math involved in voting systems — which makes sense, right, we’re counting things, we’re adding things up. And mathematicians who study voting have some worries about ranked choice voting. There are theorems that suggest that even this method doesn’t always deliver what the majority of voters want. At the same time, there are also other researchers who think that ranked choice voting could help save our democracy.
Anna Rothschild: Wow, that’s a bold claim.
Brooke Borel: I know. That’s actually why I chose the guests that will be on this show today — one is a mathematician who studies voting, and the other is more involved in on-the-ground research and advocacy, although she also comes from a quantitative background.
Anna Rothschild: Alright. Well, I can’t wait to hear this one.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: Should we use ranked choice voting for our U.S. elections in general?
Deb Otis: Yes, ranked choice voting would bring improvements at every level. It gives voters more choice. It delivers majority winners rather than candidates who just appeal to one small base of the electorate. And it encourages better campaigning — more friendly, collaborative campaigning, instead of the mudslinging that makes toxic campaigns.
Brooke Borel: This is Deb Otis. She’s the director of research and policy for Fair Vote, a nonprofit that works on election reform. She looks at how different election systems work in practice in the places that use them. And her point about collaborative campaigning is directly applicable to that mayoral primary in New York City.
Deb Otis: In New York City, we saw some of the more progressive candidates going out and campaigning together, and they were making a positive case. They were saying, “Hey, I want to be your first choice, but these other few candidates are really aligned with me, and I think you should rank them second, third, and fourth.”
I think in the non-ranked choice campaigns, they sort of incentivize the people who can be really negative — either their own campaign, or their supporters through their super PACs. And then the skills that you need to win a campaign are how to be mean to your opponent. And so the people that win campaigns are not always necessarily the people who will be really good at governing. I think one of the interesting things about ranked choice is they bring those skill sets a little closer together. Like the skills you need to win the campaign are actually the skills we would want in a mayor or a senator or a governor.
Brooke Borel: And more than that, it creates a system where more than two candidates have a real shot at winning.
Deb Otis: Right now, voters are really limited. You only get to pick one candidate, and I think in an election with two candidates, that works really well, right? You just pick the one you like best, and the winner gets more than half of the votes and they win. But as soon as you introduce a third candidate or a fourth candidate, or a lot of times you get 10 candidates running for the same office, all of a sudden it becomes really hard for voters. You only get one vote. Do you use it on the candidate you really like best? Or do you figure out which are the two frontrunners and make sure you vote for one of those two so you don’t feel like you’re wasting your vote? It puts each voter in the position of having to be strategic, having to do the math, how to really make my vote count.
Anna Rothschild: So it helps you avoid a Ralph Nader situation.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, so for those of you who don’t remember the 2000 election, or weren’t alive then, the main candidates were Al Gore and George Bush, and then Ralph Nader ran for president under the Green Party. And there still is not agreement on this one at all, but some people say he took votes from Gore and ended up handing the election to Bush.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: This is called a spoiler effect. And Deb says this effect is basically washed away with ranked choice voting. Because even if the same number of people ranked Ralph Nader as their first choice, he would have been eliminated in the instant runoff.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, ranked choice voting does sound better than our current system.
Brooke Borel: Honestly even scholars that don’t agree on this stuff, they pretty much all agree that anything would be better than our current system. Here’s what Deb had to say about it.
Deb Otis: What we’re doing now is the worst one. It’s the worst option.
Brooke Borel: Is there anyone arguing for: “Let’s just keep it as it is”?
Deb Otis: I don’t think that there are political scientists who are credibly arguing that what we’re doing is working well. There are some interest groups. There are some groups that are able to influence elections with big money and help their own faction succeed because of this polarization. And so that tends to be what we’re up against.
Brooke Borel: Somehow our current methods leave us with candidates that huge swaths of the population can’t stand. Neither has a majority. Could you talk a little bit about how ranked choice voting could prevent that?
Deb Otis: I think part of that is the way the candidates are chosen. You know, they come out of these party primaries and they maybe didn’t even get very many votes. They might’ve been winning with 30 percent, but primary turnout is really low. And so that might just be a fraction of a fraction of people. And so no wonder a lot of folks don’t feel represented by the major party nominees. But then you end up being told you’re not free to vote for one of the other choices because that might be a wasted vote, or if you vote for your honest favorite, it might just help the candidate you like least. And so that’s where the lesser of two evils narrative comes from. And I don’t think we ought to be stuck in that. I think we need a system that breaks us out of that and lets us vote honestly.
Anna Rothschild: What do they think is the best system? Are there other options besides our current system and ranked choice voting?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, academics and other experts quibble all the time over whether ranked choice voting or a bunch of other variations are better. And honestly, the distinctions are pretty small in reality, although I will probably have a bunch of mathematicians slinging rotten fruit at my podcast booth for saying that.
Anna Rothschild: Of course, of course.
Brooke Borel: Yes, but, some of the systems that may have a slight edge mathematically may be harder for voters to understand, or harder to translate to a ballot. So there are logistical barriers to those. And really there is no perfect system.
Deb Otis: You know, I think mathematicians have proven this again and again: That anything is going to come with some kind of flaws. I think a key question is just your values trade-offs. If you’re accepting some pros and cons to everything, which cons are actually dealbreakers and which pros are most important? For me, I want a system to be really strategy proof. If people understand the system better, I don’t want them to then be able to have more power and have more of a voice because they have studied mathematics, right? I want a system that is strategy proof so that everyone’s kind of on equal footing.
Brooke Borel: Could ranked choice voting help save democracy?
Deb Otis: Absolutely. It is one of the important pieces of the puzzle that we have to move towards.
[MUSIC]
Anna Rothschild: Well that’s a big claim there at the end there.
Brooke Borel: It is.
Anna Rothschild: I’m going to guess that not everyone agrees with that statement, or that we should switch everything over to ranked choice voting.
Brooke Borel: Anna, that is an excellent guess. And here’s our next guest, with more.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: Should we use ranked choice voting for our U.S. elections in general?
David McCune: It might work out actually, right? But it would be this humongous administrative and political will experiment, not to mention the mathematics of all of it, right? Unless you want to run that massive experiment, I would be skeptical and say no.
Brooke Borel: This is David McCune. He’s a professor of mathematics at William Jewell College in Missouri. His research focuses on mathematical political science, and in particular on voting. And it turns out that the mathematics behind voting can give you some really wacky real-life possibilities that, to be honest, are kind of hard to wrap your head around.
David McCune: I mean, since you’re asking me, there are a few potential issues I could see and some of them are obnoxiously academic.
Brooke Borel: That’s okay. Hey, I want to hear it.
David McCune: So ranked choice voting has this kind of strange quirk where the following scenario is possible. So imagine you are running for mayor or something of a city…
Brooke Borel: OK, David did get a little academic here. So let me break this scenario down in simple terms: For those of us who are used to plurality elections, you can start calling specific districts in a city, or whatever, before all the votes are in. Just one candidate is going to be able to make it out on top, and once a certain number of votes are in it can — not always, but can — be pretty clear who that is.
Anna Rothschild: Right, not always.
Brooke Borel: But elections with ranked choice voting are harder to predict. Let’s say you have a list of several candidates and Candidate A seems to be losing in two different districts. If you wait and tally all the votes from all the districts, though, it’s possible for that same candidate to end up on top.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, OK. So with ranked choice voting, you have to wait until the bitter end of the counting period to know who is going to win. You can’t do these early vote counts to get a sense of what the outcome might be.
Brooke Borel: Right, which means there could be a much longer delay than we are used to when it comes to counting votes.
David McCune: It’s like an additive paradox where like the whole is less than the sum of the parts. And so you could say, well, that’s purely academic. Who cares if that’s possible? But one of the practical upshots of that is that when you use plurality, you can do precinct-by-precinct reporting. With rank choice voting, you can’t do that because when you combine ballots across precincts, you get some funny things happening.
So another obnoxiously academic thing about ranked choice voting that gives me pause is that — the technical term is that it’s non-monotonic, which is just a fancy way of saying that sometimes the method doesn’t react in rational ways to changes in the ballots.
Brooke Borel: In other words, this is where the math can get kind of wacky.
David McCune: So to give you something concrete: In elections when you use ranked choice voting, it’s possible that getting more voter support can be bad for you, and getting less voter support can be good for you in very specific situations.
Brooke Borel: How is that?
David McCune: So the first time ranked choice voting was used in Alaska was in August 2022. There were three candidates: Begich, Palin, and Peltola. Peltola ended up winning. And the way the election unfolded was that Begich got eliminated first because he had the fewest first place votes, and then Peltola won against Palin head-to-head.
Brooke Borel: So just a reminder, ranked choice voting usually works like this: The last place person gets wiped out, and then their votes are redistributed. That’s what David is talking about here.
David McCune: It turns out, though, that if Peltola had done a better job of reaching out to Palin voters so that she peeled some Palin voters over to herself — you would think that’d be good for her, because now she has more support. But if she had sucked away some Palin support, then Palin would’ve been eliminated first, and then Peltola would’ve had to face Begich in the final round. And it turns out that even with the extra support she gets from Palin supporters in this hypothetical scenario, she would still lose to Begich head-to-head.
Brooke Borel: So in other words, most of Palin’s votes ranked Begich in second place. Which means that if Palin had gotten pushed out in the first round, her votes would have gone to Begich and he would have won.
David McCune: So that’s an example of a non-monotonic outcome where you can gain support and that’s bad for you. From an academic perspective — maybe even from a non-academic perspective — this kind of thing is bad. It should always be good for you to get more support and should always be bad for you if you lose support. And so to me, this is not like a knockdown reason not to use ranked choice voting. Every voting method has issues, but it does give me pause because what if we had a competitive presidential election where it turns out that one of the losers could have won if only they’d lost some votes from Wisconsin or something. I don’t know. That seems like it would be disruptive and shake faith in the system.
Brooke Borel: So as I understand it, you’ve studied nearly 200 elections that use ranked choice voting. Based on what you’ve seen, how often do these flaws actually happen in reality?
David McCune: So there’ve been something like 500 or 600 single-winner ranked choice elections in the U.S. since the year, let’s say, 2000 or something. These flaws occur rarely, so non-monotonic outcomes occur maybe five, six times out of that. These flaws, though, they occur in competitive elections. So if it’s a blowout — if one candidate gets 70 percent of the first place vote — you’re not going to see any flaws. It’s just a crushing victory and who cares?
But if you have an election where Candidate A gets like 35 percent of the vote, Candidate B gets 33 percent, Candidate C gets whatever’s left, 32 percent — those kinds of elections that are highly competitive and you’re much more likely to see a non-monotonic outcome or to see some sort of strategic voting. You’re also going to have to wait much longer for the results to come in, probably.
Anna Rothschild: I mean, Brooke, yeah, even if that happens rarely, I don’t love the sound of that. And the strategic voting problem is exactly what Deb Otis said ranked choice voting was aiming to avoid.
Brooke Borel: Exactly, and what happens if you have this happen in a really big, high stakes election. Like the U.S. presidential election?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that sounds like that could turn into a nightmare.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And David also pointed out another concern about switching the U.S. presidential election to ranked choice voting. And it wasn’t just a matter of mathematics. So this comes back to the logistics on the ground. Because of the way that ranked choice ballots are tallied, there are some infrastructural changes that would have to be made. You can’t tally by precinct, remember, because as we already discussed, the outcome could change as you add the results for more and more precincts together.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
David McCune: So administratively, what you would need is some central counting location. Every ballot in some form would have to be communicated to that counting location. And so every precinct in, let’s say Alaska, would have to somehow get their ballots, presumably in electronic form, to some sort of central location.
Brooke Borel: And if we’re talking about a national election, that gets even trickier.
David McCune: Where’s that location going to be? Once you decide where it is, what, do you keep it a secret? That seems bad. Once you decide where it’s going to be, now it’s just a moth to a flame kind of situation, where the flame is the location, and the moths are conspiracy nuts. And we’ve already seen in 2020, having an aggressive crowd outside of counting places can be bad. So that’s one thing, but also you do have to wait for all the ballots to come in. And so with the current system, with all of its flaws, you can call New York like an hour after the polling place is closed.
It would not be unheard of for you to have to wait weeks and at the national level: 150 million ballots is way bigger than anything we’ve seen. The largest rank choice voting election in the U.S. was the 2021 New York mayoral primary. That had around a million ballots and that took a while to sort out.
Brooke Borel: Just a quick update: What David said here used to be true, but the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary election in New York City had an even bigger turnout.
David McCune: So if you said overnight we could switch to a national ranked choice voting election for presidential elections, I would probably say yes. Like if I had the power to do that. But it has these drawbacks that I don’t know, until rubber meets the road and you actually try it, it might not actually be so obvious how bad these administrative delays might be.
Anna Rothschild: Wait, OK, so David McCune isn’t totally against ranked choice, right? It sounds like if he could wave a magic wand and do away with some of these logistical issues, he might actually come around?
Brooke Borel: Well, unlike Deb Otis, David is deeply skeptical that something like ranked choice voting would ever help save our democracy. He even questioned the premise: Does it need saving?
Anna Rothschild: Right, there is a lot of value baked into that statement.
Brooke Borel: Exactly. But you’re right. Although he has a lot of hesitations, he’s not totally against the idea. He’d like to be able to have more data though — to run some experiments in different states and see what works best.
Anna Rothschild: He is a mathematician.
Brooke Borel: He’s a mathematician, he likes the data. But in reality, he doesn’t think we should do some kind of grand experiment to test it out, because it could be a total disaster. We want the data, but the reality of getting it is complicated. Still, I was actually surprised that when I brought David and Deb together, they found a decent amount of common ground.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: So I was curious to start this out: Do you two know each other? I know you know each other through reputation, but have you met before?
Deb Otis: A little bit. We have chatted over email. I think we shared some data around Portland’s election, but I don’t think we’ve ever met in person.
Brooke Borel: Great. So here we are. Great. Bringing people together.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: One thing we talked about was how ranked choice voting might work, in theory, in a presidential election.
Deb Otis: So we’re getting into questions about national elections, but you know, we don’t really have any national elections. Our presidential election is a series of state elections within the context of the electoral college. And so each state tabulates however they want. And right now, Maine and Alaska use ranked choice for president. So their electoral college votes are already decided using ranked choice voting. And they’re not impacted by what any other states are doing. It’s just how Alaska’s electoral votes are allocated. So if all of the states were to do this, they would still be using their own processes. They’d be siloed and, just like it happens now, some will be faster than others.
Brooke Borel: OK. So it wouldn’t be pooling all states together. It would still be doing state-by-state, just each state would have its own ranked choice voting.
Deb Otis: Unless we abolish the electoral college. I think that’s for the next podcast.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. That’s perhaps beyond the scope of this particular episode.
David McCune: So when people talk about ranked choice voting on a national scale, I guess you have to clarify ahead of time, which we should have done, what you’re talking about. So some ranked choice voting advocates do want a nationwide ranked choice voting election — that’s sort of what I was thinking about. That’s much easier said than done, as Deb knows, right? Anytime you want to switch electoral systems, you need a huge sort of political capital and all this sort of thing. So on a state-by-state basis, Deb is correct that like some states are just kind of close anyway, right? In Florida in 2000 there was this huge delay, right?
Brooke Borel: By the way, he’s talking about the 2000 presidential election — the one with Bush, Gore, and Nader. There was a delay on the vote count in Florida, which was the state that ended up pushing the outcome in Bush’s favor.
David McCune: So if things are super close, it doesn’t really matter what electoral system you use. There’s going to be delays. Rightfully so, right? When you try to sort out the counts.
Anna Rothschild: Just out of curiosity, I know this episode is technically about ranked choice voting, but if it does end up being too complicated to implement on a large scale, what are the other options?
Brooke Borel: Those other options might not be any easier to implement, by the way. But voting experts, especially the mathematicians, always have a favorite. So, one method that David really likes is approval voting. This is where you can vote for all of the candidates you approve of, but you don’t rank them.
Anna Rothschild: Oh interesting.
Brooke Borel: He also likes Condorcet voting, which is where you tally each of the candidates against each other head-to-head. He notes there are caveats, though. Whether these slight variations are truly better than ranked choice voting is unclear, because remember: There is no perfect voting system.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: And even if there were a perfect system, no matter what, switching to a new system is never going to be easy. You need buy-in from voters, you need a ballot that is easy for them to understand. You need new voting machines that are capable of counting up the votes in whatever way the method requires.
Anna Rothschild: But if the goal is to get a better system in place, and ranked choice voting has upsides compared to plurality voting, how much should we actually be worried about all the very fine nuances between these systems?
Brooke Borel: Anna, I had the same question.
Brooke Borel: So if the current system is not working very well, is it even worth doing all of this quibbling over all of these different possible alternatives? At what point do we just accept some imperfections in one of these alternatives and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Deb Otis: David brought up a really good point earlier that it takes some political will to change the system. If you change to one system and then decide that it’s not working for your city, it’s much more likely that your city just reverts back to the worst system rather than experimenting with yet another new alternative. And so I think for any individual city or state wanting to make this change, it is worth doing the research and having these debates up front and picking the one that’s right — and getting it right the first time. Because you might only get one shot every 20 years to fix your election system.
But I don’t think there’s necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution. You know, there are 15 different ways to implement even ranked choice voting. There are a hundred different Condorcet methods out there. Individual circumstances in a city can tell you which kind of ranked choice voting might be right for you. And so I think we should be open to different reform pathways to solve different problems.
David McCune: Yeah I basically agree with that. In particular, on the academic side where I live, people can often get siloed. Because you prove a bunch of theorems that show that your voting method is best — you know, approval voting, right, is best according to some metric — it’s very easy to kind of silo yourself and say, “Well, that’s what we should be using,” and accept nothing else. But yeah, I basically accept the premise that you shouldn’t let — what’s the phrase? Let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
David McCune: That’s fair enough. I mean, yeah. So when I say I wish we could just run a natural experiment where Illinois did one thing, Indiana did another thing, I realize that’s not achievable whatsoever. Especially the part where we reevaluate how it goes.
Brooke Borel: Sure.
David McCune: I don’t trust it. The stakes are too high, right? So I don’t trust people to do that in good faith.
Deb Otis: David, I would trust you and I to get together and do those evaluations. Let’s do it.
David McCune: Put Deb in charge. Yeah. If you just — a co-dictatorship with me and Deb. That’s the best system.
Brooke Borel: OK, great.
David McCune: There are very practical things you can think about even with ranked choice voting. So just to give you one example, Minneapolis uses ranked choice voting for city council elections, but what does that actually mean?
It means that they take the city and they carve it into individual districts. So they have like 12 districts, and inside each district they have an RCV election to elect one person per district. And that’s how they get their council. What you could do instead, and what Portland, Oregon did recently, is say, “Well, if what you want is a legislative body to reflect what the electorate looks like,” then the single winner, single district, even with rank choice voting, might not produce the outcomes you want.
So Portland, Oregon uses a system where they still have districts, but there’s fewer of them. And inside each district they elect three winners. And you use a proportional version of rank choice voting.
Brooke Borel: So Anna, just to clarify, in Portland, they have multiple representatives for each district — not just one, like they do in Minneapolis. If you only have one representative, and you have, say, 60 percent conservative voters and 40 percent liberal voters in that district, the conservative candidates are usually going to win even with ranked choice voting.
Anna Rothschild: Mmm, so it still doesn’t totally represent the electorate.
Brooke Borel: Exactly. But if you have multiple representatives per district, you get better representation with ranked choice voting because there are more slots to fill.
David McCune: Even if you agree that ranked choice voting is the best thing to do, things like that can make a pretty sizable difference, I think. And I would argue for the second thing: Having more winners and do proportional ranked choice voting, instead of the single-winner district.
Deb Otis: I agree. And David, you were just a co-author on a piece analyzing how it went in Portland, and I thought that was a really good paper.
David McCune: I wasn’t going to bring it up, but yeah, Deb is right: I’m an author on a groundbreaking study. So in Portland, Oregon, I think that report pretty convincingly shows that proportional ranked choice voting, this multiwinner thing, did a good job.
Deb Otis: I was really persuaded by it, too. You know, these were the arguments that folks heard when they implemented that system. And this report looked at, well, how did that hold up in practice? Now the first election with it is over. You know what, who won? How did the campaigns go? How did it work? And it really showed that it’s living up to its promise. And I think a lot of cities should be looking towards what Portland did.
Brooke Borel: So at the top of this conversation, I asked if we should be using ranked choice voting for all of our elections here in the U.S. And David, you said something like: “Maybe Deb will convince me otherwise.” Has she convinced you of anything today?
David McCune: I’m always impressed with Deb’s on-the-ground knowledge, which is a blind spot for me, right? Because I mostly do the mathematics. I’m not sure that I’ve been convinced we should use it for every election, but generally speaking, I find it useful to listen whenever Deb is talking about any sort of practical on-the-ground stuff. For example, I don’t have nitty gritty knowledge of the administrative stuff. I don’t know how the voting machines work, per se.
Brooke Borel: And Deb, has David said anything particularly compelling today that has made you think differently about your position?
Deb Otis: I love hearing the way David talks about the properties of all of these different systems, and I appreciate that you bring this academic understanding of the properties, but then also putting it in context. We don’t know how these will work in practice, and we can’t know until we try some of them. I appreciate that attitude of wanting to see these in practice. I don’t think that I’ve changed my mind that there’s a better method for these single winner elections.
David McCune: Come on, Deb.
Deb Otis: You’re not going to get me. You’re not going to get me on Condorcet.
Brooke Borel: So close.
David McCune: But I am serious when I say academics in general — and me, probably, personally — should have a bit more humility, because it’s very easy to set up abstract models and run simulations on them and come to a conclusion. But there can be a big breakdown between theory and practice, and that’s often a blind spot for a lot of [academics], especially people who get married to one system.
And you can find that a lot across the academic landscape. People who — well, I mean, not a lot, but I have encountered people who are tied to their one system that hasn’t even been implemented anywhere, right? And you should acknowledge that it might not go the way you think it goes if you actually try to implement it.
Deb Otis: From the practitioner side, we have some of those challenges as well. We have to be very careful not to overpromise. All of these systems will be an improvement, but nothing on its own is the one silver bullet that can fix everything. Sometimes in order to get something passed, you have to make it sound like it’s the greatest thing in the world to bring supporters in, and then it turns out to be pretty darn good, but it didn’t solve every problem. So we always have to be careful about that. As practitioners, we can learn a lot from the flags that the academic community raises about these different systems and where it’s meeting its promises and where it’s not.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: So how are you feeling, Anna?
Anna Rothschild: I mean, my biggest takeaway from this episode is that what we’re doing now seems to be just the worst option and we should be switching to something else. That’s what I have learned today.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And it’s really interesting. I loved having these two guests on just to sort of talk about this whole mix of theory and on-the-ground logistics. Like what might be the best approach when you talk to a mathematician might not actually work out on the ground so well. So it’s good to hear the theoretical side and the practical side.
Anna Rothschild: For sure.
Brooke Borel: But no matter what, there’s no perfect voting system.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. It’s so interesting, like democracy seems like such a simple concept, and yet it’s so hard to implement
Brooke Borel: I know. The math seems like it should be easy. Just add the votes.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. You just think it’s an addition problem, right? Like a child could do it. But that’s just not how it works.
Brooke Borel: It just is not true. So let’s bring it back to the New York City mayoral race. As I understand it, they are not doing ranked choice voting for the actual race. They only do it in the primaries?
Anna Rothschild: Yes, exactly. And as an interesting wrinkle, Cuomo is running again, but this time as an independent. So it will be Zohran Mamdani as the democratic candidate, Cuomo as an independent. And to make things even more confusing, as of this recording, our current mayor, Eric Adams, is also running as an independent now.
Brooke Borel: Right.
Anna Rothschild: And then there is the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. So it is a four man race.
Brooke Borel: Great. And without ranked choice voting, it’s going to be plurality again.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, exactly. So it’s interesting to see how the strategy is different this time around.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, like will their actual campaign strategies be different? What will the outcome look like as well?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I mean, it’s happening now, so we’ll see what the outcome is in November.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, it’s happening now. So I think that’s a good place to stop for today. I am curious whether our listeners have a favorite voting system. Are you a Condorcet person? Are you a plurality gal?
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. Send us an email to [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.
[MUSIC]
Brooke Borel: And that’s it for this episode of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark Magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Our amazing producer and editor is Samia Bouzid. The show is fact-checked by Undark deputy Editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell, and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor in chief Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.