Massachusetts voters this election will get to decide whether to give their future ballots a major overhaul.
Ranked-choice voting is the focus of one of two statewide ballots questions this fall.
During the campaign, supporters and opponents have each claimed their side is for election fairness and against voter disenfranchisement.
Joining us for a short debate to try to untangle the issues: Evan Falchuk, chair of the "Yes on 2 Campaign" and a former independent candidate for Massachusetts governor, and Anthony Amore, a former candidate for secretary of state who does not support ranked-choice voting.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: So, Evan, how would ranked-choice voting work?
Evan Falchuk: Ranked-choice voting would be a simple fix to our democracy that would give you the opportunity, as a voter, to rank candidates in a multi-candidate race by your first choice, your second choice, your third choice and so on.
And what it would do is make it so that you never felt like your vote was being wasted. Like I found as an independent candidate that people said, "I would like to vote for you, but you can't win." Well, you could always vote for who you like, and vote your hopes and not your fears. And it's one of the great things that ranked-choice voting does.
Ranked-choice voting elects the candidate, from among three or more, who gets 50% of the vote, plus one vote.
Anthony, what is it about this process of getting a candidate to become the majority vote-getter that you are opposed to?
Anthony Amore: Well, there's a number of things, Carrie. Chiefly, first, the ballot that is intended to achieve this is very complicated. And we find that many people have difficulties with it.
In Minneapolis, where they had ranked-choice voting, 10% of the ballots that were involved were discounted because of errors.
And studies show that these occur mostly in communities of color. So we're concerned about disenfranchising people.
But on top of that: the goals that the pro side has for ranked-choice voting are noble, but they're never achieved by ranked-choice voting. So in principle, they sound good, but in practice, they never happen.
Evan, do you have a quick response to that?
Yeah, we have endorsers for this among so many good-government and voting rights groups and leaders. So, people like former Governor Deval Patrick, former Governor Bill Weld, organizations like Common Cause and MassVOTE. The Boston Globe has endorsed this campaign. So it is clear that ranked-choice voting is simple, easy and it works.
Some also say the decision to support ranked-choice voting is not aligned with a specific party. But there is a party split on this question, with more Democratic leaders in support, and more Republican leaders opposed.
Anthony, you happen to be a Republican. Is this a partisan issue?
No, absolutely not. In fact, the people that Evan cited are Democrats. But on our side, we have Jerry Brown, who is far from a Republican, and called it "complexifying" — [and] Gavin Newsom, who is a staunch liberal, who vetoed ranked-choice voting. The ACLU of Kansas spelled out all the ways that it's unfair. The NAACP of New York State [and Reverend] Jesse Jackson are all opposed to [ranked-choice] voting, because it doesn't treat voters fairly.
Question 2 in Massachusetts would establish ranked-choice voting in the state. @efalchuk and @anthonymamore debate the ballot question with host @CarrieHealy2. pic.twitter.com/M7DZY1HQ7J— New England Public Media (@nepublicmedia) October 22, 2020
Evan, what about when it comes to the exhausted voter? I'm thinking the voter who gets into the voting booth, and just stops ranking the candidates after his or her first choice — or maybe first and second choice — because they don't remember from among the many that they preferred, or they just didn't care to keep numbering. Isn't that a possibility?
It is. And in ranked-choice voting, you always have the opportunity to decide if you want to rank. You could vote just like you vote today. You can rank two. You could rank five. You could rank whatever number you want. It's up to the voter.
The problem of... people's votes not being counted in the same way happens in our current system, and it's much worse.
So, for example, we had a congressional race in the 4th Congressional District, where I live, where there were nine candidates, and the winner got 22% of the vote.
Now, number one, that's a problem. That means that 78% of people voted for somebody else. But to the question you're asking, those same 78% of people also didn't have their second choices, or even their preferences, recorded in the final outcome.
So the problem, of course, is something that can exist in ranked-choice voting, but it's far worse in our current system.
Anthony, do you want to take a stab at that?
Sure, there's a couple of things. First, yes, 78% of people voted for someone other than the ultimate winner in that election. But even under ranked-choice voting, they would have voted for someone other than their first-place choice. The votes that would have elected the person would have been the second, third, fourth, you know, "This person's sort of good enough" type of thing.
But secondly, research has shown that in the average ranked-choice voting election, 11% of all votes are discarded. Think about that number. That's a large number of people who are disenfranchised from the final winner.
And because of that, because those votes are pulled out of the denominator when the figures are counted, ranked-choice voting does not always result in the person getting over 50%. Maine Policy Institute looked at over 90 elections, and they found in 61% of them, the winner got less than 50%, because exhausted ballots are taken out of the denominator. That's problematic.
Evan, the pro-ranked-choice voting side has raised in excess of about $7 million this campaign. The largest donors are all from out of state. Why shouldn't that concern Massachusetts voters?
Well, let's talk about the truth of this campaign. I've been involved for almost four years, and when I started, there were hundreds of volunteers across Massachusetts. It's now over 6,500 volunteers, thousands and thousands of donors.
And yes, it is true that in that time we have got the attention of a lot of folks who care a lot about democracy reform, some of whom don't live in Massachusetts. But this is truly a grassroots movement.
Now I'll say that among those big donors are a lot of great reformers here in Massachusetts, people like the managing [partner] of the Celtics, Steve Pagliuca, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and many, many others. But this is really a campaign about the voters.
And the other thing I'll say is that every single one of our donors is disclosed and no one stands to make any money off of this improvement of our democracy. So this is all about, again, those volunteers, the supporters, the endorsers who care about making our democracy better at a time when we need that kind of improvement.
But the big money has come from out of state.
Some money absolutely has come from from out of state. But, again, there's there's no one — it's all disclosed, and that's the reason we're able to talk about it. And no one is going to benefit financially other than seeing good things happen to our democracy.
Anthony?
Well, with all due respect to Evan, I think to say "some" of the money comes from out of state is an understatement. Over 80% of the money backing the pro side has come from out of state. Of the 16 top donors to the pro-side, 14 are from outside Massachusetts. Millions come from just a handful of donors, ranging from George Soros — George Soros' son, I'm sorry — to Rupert Murdoch's daughter, to a billionaire from Enron. These are not Massachusetts people.
The vast majority of the money in this campaign has come from out of state. And that should be problematic to the people of Massachusetts wondering why these people are so concerned about how we, in Massachusetts, vote, when we know in other cities where we've had ranked-choice voting — like Burlington, Vermont, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the state of North Carolina — have had ranked-choice voting and abandoned it because they saw the problems and the disenfranchisement.
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