Governor Kay Ivey signed SB186 this week to ” to protect the integrity of Alabama elections by banning the use of ranked-choice voting.”
I will confess from the top that I have zero idea how this protects “the integrity” of elections. That is just sloganeering.
The Governor explains:
“I am proud to sign this bill which takes another step towards ensuring the confidence in our elections. As our Secretary of State Wes Allen put it, ranked-choice voting makes winners out of losers. Not only is ranked-choice voting confusing to voters, it also limits their ability to directly elect the candidate of their choice. Voting should be simple, and this complicated and confusing method of voting has no place in Alabama’s elections.”
This super-condescending: RCV is just too complicated for voters to worry their pretty little head over! But worse, this is nonsense, insofar as the basic mechanism of ranked-choice voting is no different than run-off elections, which Alabama uses for all primaries.
And, I would note, that sometimes the person who was winning in the first round, loses in the second round!
Why, it just so happens that that is how Wes Allen became Secretary of State!
Here’s the first round of the 2022 Republican primary for SoS:
And the run-off result:
Source: Ballotpedia.
The only substantive difference between RCV and a run-off like this is how long it takes to come to a resolution. Moreover, RCV would save money and have the advantage of having the same electorate for all rounds as opposed to somewhat different voters in round one and round two. To wit, in R1 above there were 556,420 voters and in R2 there were 379,545. Really, RCV is superior in a host of ways from the normal two-round process.
The issue is, really, whether we want a system that produces a plurality (simple majority) winner or an absolute majority winner. By definition any system that requires an absolute majority winner that has more than two candidates running can create a dynamic in which the final winner was actually losing in the first round of voting. It’s called math.
The entire purpose of any absolute majority outcome to ensure that the winner has, you know, the support of the actual majority.
The dishonesty/dissembling/ignorance of it all is just stunning–not to mention this is all pointless because, clearly, there is no appetite for RCV in the state so this is “protecting” Alabamians from a phantom menace.
It is truly courageous to ban something that no one was trying to do in the first place!
The sad thing is that this is a signal of opposition even to anodyne electoral reform. (The reality is, despite some hopes to the contrary, RCV would have very little effect on US politics, even if implemented widely).
