In an earlier post, A Proportional Response, I discuss some of the issues affecting our electoral process. However, in that post I focused on the Electoral College and elections of Representatives, avoiding addressing the Senate at the time. The focus then was the adoption of a proportional system, which could not be overlaid Senate elections. With only two Senators from each state, and only one Senator elected to a seat in each election cycle, there is no opportunity for apportioning votes. However, as I think many of those same issues apply to the Senate, that is where I would like to now turn my attention.
Even before that original post there was discussion on the adoption of ranked choice voting in our elections. Since Alaska has joined Maine as the second state to conduct their elections using a ranked choice model when Alaskans voted in favor of a ballot initiative on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The concept behind ranked choice voting is fairly simple. The candidate with the broadest popular appeal is elected to office by passing the 50% vote threshold after voters’ candidate rankings are allocated and reallocated. The hope being that this would increase party representation and decrease partisanship.
First, it may be helpful to take a step back and more fully explain how ranked choice voting works. When a voter enters the polling booth to cast their ballot for their Senator, they will be presented with the candidates running for that Senate seat, as expected. Hypothetically, a voter may see a member of the Republican, Democratic, Green, and Libertarian parties on their ballot. However, instead of selecting a single candidate to cast their ballot for, the voter ranks all candidates from their most desired to least desired. For example:
(1) Green
(2) Democrat
(3) Libertarian
(4) Republican
As the votes are tabulated, under a ranked choice system, it is no longer the candidate with the most votes who wins (a plurality), but the first candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote (a majority). This is achieved by dropping the candidate who has received the fewest number of votes, and reallocating those votes to the other candidates. For any voters who had this candidate ranked first, their votes will be reallocated to their second choice. In the example provided above, if the Green party received the fewest votes, then this voter’s ballot would be cast for the Democrat candidate. This continues until a candidate is allocated more than 50% of the votes.
It is through this reallocation process that a ranked choice system will result in the candidate with the broadest popular appeal winning office. It is very likely that the candidate will not be everyone’s first choice, but it will at least be a majority of people’s second or third choices. It also means that voters continue to have a say in who is elected instead of being shut out of the process if their preferred candidate does not win outright, as in our standard electoral process.
Also, by being able to rank candidates, the incentives for strategic voting are reduced. By this I mean; under our current system of voting we get to cast one ballot for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes win. This framing forces voters to weigh whether they would rather vote for their preferred candidate and risk seeing the candidate they have the most disagreements with win, or vote for a candidate they mostly align with that has a better chance of winning. Said another way, voters are asked to consider whether they would rather vote for a candidate or against one.
Under a ranked choice model, third-party candidates would no longer be seen as spoilers to one of the two major parties; a characterization used by the two major parties to disparage third-parties, and their candidates, and dissuade voters from casting their ballots for a third-party candidate. The result being, voting for a third-party candidate would no longer be seen by voters as a protest vote, or worse, a throw-away vote. As I have mentioned before, raising the profile of third-parties increases ideological representation within our government. By increasing ideological representation, voters will feel like they have someone in government who has their interests in mind. It seems intuitive that increasing ideological responsiveness would increase voter engagement.
Lastly, candidates will need to adjust their campaign strategies; campaigning to not only be voters first choice, but their second and third choices as well, shifting away from base activation and toward appealing to a broader coalition of voters. Unless a candidate is able to win outright based on voters’ first preference, the only path to victory is through also being a second or third choice. The hope is that due to the change in incentives, campaigns would be more civil, and that civility would ideally carry over to governing. Examples of this have been seen in Maine where candidates running against one another have appeared in the same campaign ads.
It is worth pointing out that a few states currently have instant runoff elections—Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—meaning that if no single candidate passes the 50% threshold another election is held between the two leading candidates. One might think that this would have the same intended effects as a ranked choice voter model, however, that does not seem to be the case. This does address the concern that voters of a losing candidate lose their ability to have a say in who the winner should be. However, because a separate, special election is held voter turnout is usually substantially lower than the general election—23% lower on average, as shown in Figure A, below.
Figure A:
Further, as we saw in the 2020 Senate election in Georgia between Doug Collins (R), Kelly Loeffler (R), and Ralph Warnock (D) the potential for an instant runoff election was not a sufficient incentive for candidates to not run a negative campaign nor run a base activation campaign. Collins and Loeffler, both Republicans, ran incendiary campaigns against one another, trying to run to the right of the other. These are members of the same party running attack ads against one another. As a result, this Senate campaign is headed to a runoff between Loeffler and Warnock.
So, it would seem that instant runoff elections do not produce the intended benefits of a ranked choice election method.
With the understanding of a ranked choice model and the intended benefits we should now look at the arguments against the current Senate election model. Looking at Figure B, which details the percentage of the total popular vote by party and seats won by party from the 2000 election through the 2018 election, we are able to see a few things. First, Democrats in 2000 and Republicans in 2010 won a majority of Senate seats despite not winning a majority of votes. Second, on two different occasions, 2004 and 2016, Democrats won the popular share of the vote but lost in the share of seats.
Figure B:
Practically this translates to is Republicans having a two-seat majority in the Senate in 2016 despite winning 17.45 million fewer votes in Senate elections from 2012 to 2016 and a three-seat majority in 2018 though winning 13.96 million fewer votes. This Senate also confirmed three Supreme Court Justices nominated by a President who won 2.8 million fewer votes than his opponent.
Some observers have seen these outcomes of our elections and argued that this is undemocratic. Others have gone farther to argue that this is a dangerous pattern. A party that is not only able to win without needing to appeal or respond to a majority of the public, but actively seeks a minoritarian path to victory will seek to protect that path to power; namely through voter restrictions like ballot ID laws, purges of the voter rolls, closing polling locations, restricting absentee and early voting options, and gerrymandering districts, to name a few.
I do not necessarily disagree with this assessment, in fact it’s one of the reasons I advocate for a proportional system for electing the President and Representatives. Certainly, when taking the Electoral College, gerrymandering of House Districts, and malapportionment of the Senate together I think the argument is quite strong. However, if we look at the Senate in isolation, I think the argument weakens a bit. Looking at Senate election results in the aggregate, as we did above, could be a bit misleading. Senators are elected by the voters in individual states, not in nation wide elections. It’s for this reason I think the argument that Senators are not responsive to a majority of voters could be disingenuous.
So instead, if we look at Senate races from 2000 through 2018, we can see how responsive to voters Senators truly needed to be. Looking to Figure C, below we can see that on average over the 10 election cycles from 2000 to 2018 3 elections per cycle, or 10%, are won by Senators who win fewer than 50% of the vote.
Figure C:
Of these 34 elections with candidates winning fewer than 50% of votes, the candidates are from 19 states. Alaska contributes the most elections with five candidates winning without a majority of the votes. As pointed out earlier Alaska has adopted a ranked choice model. After Alaska; Colorado (3), Minnesota (3), Missouri (3) would be the states which might most benefit from a ranked choice system.
Though Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi have runoff elections I think it is reasonable to included them within the analysis of Figure C, for the reasons outlined above. If we do, then the average number of elections increases from 3 to 4 per cycle, or from 10% to 11%. Furthermore, Louisiana would join Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri as it has had three Senate runoff elections over the 10 Senate election cycles.
Now, it is worth considering that there is nothing systematic about Senate elections which would allow for Senators to win and hold their seats despite consistently failing to win with a majority of votes, as the Electoral College allows Presidential candidates to win without wining even the plurality of votes. Further, there is no strategic advantage that one party has over the other; Democrats and Republicans benefit from wining with only a plurality. In fact, it is a fairly even split between the two parties with Democrats winning 19 elections and Republicans winning 14 elections with fewer than 50% of the popular vote.
However, we should consider whether the current system is really producing the best results. As I argued in my earlier post, our system is currently structured in a way that incentivizes a two-party system, and this bipartisan structure forces a false choice which creates apathy within the voting population. Voter preferences are more complex than two parties are able to reflect, and if voters do not see themselves reflected in the available candidates (or available viable candidates) then they are less likely to vote. As shown in Figure D.1, below, turnout for Senate elections are already low when compared to Presidential election turnout, 68% on average. And, as discussed in A Proportional Response, Presidential election turnout in the US is not particularly high to begin with, with an average 15% of registered voters not voting in Presidential elections.
Figure D.1:
Figure D.2 shows that Senate voter turnout falls further during non-Presidential election years, decreasing on average by 25%.
Figure D.2:
It is easy to imagine how allowing voters the ability to express their preference without it being thought of as a protest vote and, what’s more, allowing them to continue to be involved in the process even after their preferred candidate has not won would increase voter engagement in the process and confidence in the system. If voter engagement is truly activated and more voters do turn out and they vote their true preference they we would also begin to see that diversity reflected in our elected officials as more parties begin to receive more traction.
Lastly, I would like to return to the concerns raised in response to Senate results not reflecting the majority of the electorate. Concerns over the malapportionment of the Senate are valid as the rural-urban divide between Republicans and Democrats continues to grow and as the Senate has a rural bias—Wyoming and California have the same representation within the Senate despite Wyoming having 1.5% of California’s population. I am not convinced that this is the problem, however. One of this country’s founding principles was “majority rules, minority rights” and the Senate seems instrumental to the preservation of minority rights. The issue, as I see it, is that our parties are straining our system in ways it was not designed to withstand. The system of checks and balances was designed to create competition between the branches of government, each protecting its own power. But in a two-party system, where ambitions of the party supersede ambitions of the institution, parties cooperate across branches and those checks and balances break down. Therefore, the solution would not seem to be correcting the apportionment of the Senate, but breaking our bipolar system to create a multipolar system. By disaggregating the power of the parties and increasing competition, it will be difficult to wield across institutions. Maybe then the ambitions of the institution will again supersede the ambitions of the party.
