Nathan Atkinson looks into effect on outcomes of ranked-choice voting.
When many of us think about the 2000 U.S. presidential election of George W. Bush vs. Al Gore, we recall Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court case that ultimately decided the close race.
But over the past two decades, that election inspired a growing interest in ranked-choice voting (RCV), where voters identify their first choice and then rank the other candidates in order of preference. Some folks thought the third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, took support away from Gore, a candidate who might have otherwise won.
Nathan Atkinson, assistant professor at University of Wisconsin Law School, who has always been interested in elections, started wondering more about ranked-choice voting after Alaska adopted it in 2020: What was the goal, and did the outcomes meet it?
“What struck me was that the advocates were making claims that were not just unsubstantiated by the empirical and theoretical evidence but were often quite contrary to things we have known in the voting literature for decades or even longer,” Atkinson said.
This apparent conflict led Atkinson to join co-authors Ned Foley and Scott C. Ganz on “Beyond the Spoiler Effect: Can Ranked Choice Voting Solve the Problem of Political Polarization?”
In reviewing anonymized ballots in Alaska’s 2022 elections, the authors found candidates in the middle, not the fringe, were eliminated. And in one race out of three, a candidate who was not the most representative won. Both of those outcomes are counter to common RCV goals.
The paper will be published this fall in the University of Illinois Law Review.
With the shift of America’s political landscape and loss of middle ground, Nathan Atkinson wants to investigate more on how ranked-choice voting performs in polarized environments.
Ranked-choice voting is used for statewide elections in Alaska and Maine but a little more widely in local-level elections — like Seattle and more than 40 other cities. The approach is under consideration in Nevada and more than a dozen other states, according to an NBC News review in 2023.
On the flip side, because RCV can be seen as confusing and complicated, five states have banned it.
In the most well-known version of RCV, instant runoff voting, the candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated, and ballots cast for that candidate are recast for voters’ second choices. The process repeats itself until a candidate reaches a majority.
With the shift of America’s political landscape and loss of middle ground, Atkinson wants to investigate more on how ranked-choice voting performs in polarized environments.
“A small change in voter behavior can have a big impact in instant-runoff voting in a way that’s not true in other systems,” he said. “And moderates are not going to get enough support even though they might be a consensus candidate. This is a flaw of instant-runoff voting that other forms of ranked choice voting don’t share.”