“The more I learn about it, the more I wonder why we don’t use it in every city and state, let alone country,” social studies teacher Chloe Root said.
Even though she discusses ranked choice voting in her government class and she’s known about the concept for several years, Root has never gotten to experience ranked voting in the polling place since Michigan doesn’t have it as an option for elections.
“I think there are two camps,” Root said, “There are the people who don’t understand [ranked choice voting] and the people who don’t benefit from it.”
People who work for the Democrats and Republicans often use excuses such as “it’s too complicated” to continue to use “first past the post voting,” our current method of voting. With Ranked Choice Voting, they have more competition than before, even though it also gives you the option to pick a single candidate if you want to.
Root believes that if more people inform themselves about the effect of ranked choice voting on elections, there’ll be a larger push for having it be an option across the country.
Donna Estabrook, a volunteer for rankMIvote, has similar views as Chloe Root. She claims that people already use ranked choice voting in their everyday lives relating to decisions as small as picking ice cream flavors at the ice cream shop.
“It’s also more civil than our current method of voting. When you’re a candidate vs. someone else’s competition, it encourages the candidates to talk about the issues at hand instead of denigrating the opponent,” Estabrook said. “It also encourages other people and parties to run more often. There are lots of other parties that people forget about, because they don’t have as much money, status, influence or fame as the Republicans and Democrats.”
At Community High School, ranked choice voting is our current method of voting for leadership positions in Forum Council, which is run by Ryan Silvester, another social studies teacher.
Another method of voting that’s similar to ranked choice voting that doesn’t get used for FOCO is runoff voting. With runoff voting you eliminate candidates each round, but it takes more time because you have to distribute the eliminated candidates’ votes among the remaining candidates.
Silvester agrees with Estabrook and Root that the United States’ method of voting is more beneficial towards Democrats and Republicans than towards all political parties. He believes that when voters are confined to two options, they don’t put enough thought or effort into their vote. Voters end up picking the candidate who shares the most beliefs with them, instead of the most beneficial candidate. This is why he thinks that ranked choice voting is a more advantageous form of polling.
Ranked choice voting is something that we unconsciously use in our daily lives, but since our current method of voting has been serving larger political parties and politicians, excuses such as ‘it doesn’t make any sense’ get thrown around. It’s because of this self-serving attitude that we haven’t gotten to experience this method outside of a high school council election.
