I am responding to Donald Torrey’s recent letter (“The downfalls of ranked-choice voting,” Aug. 21). He makes a number of misleading and false statements that should be corrected.
He refers to Arrow’s Theorem, which shows that no ranked-order electoral system is perfect. What he fails to mention is that any of them is considered to be better than our current plurality voting system when there are three or more candidates.
The latter has the major flaw of vote-splitting, and therefore forces voters to strategize about “who can win.” And even then, they can end up with a winner that the majority does not support.
His preferred system, top-two runoff, is also subject to this theorem, does not eliminate strategizing or vote splitting, and requires a second election that is usually low turnout.
Ranked-choice voting, conversely, eliminates vote splitting, having the beneficial property that a voter’s later choices will not affect their earlier choices. Voters are free to rank as few or as many candidates as they want on a single ballot, and in the instant runoff that follows everyone can participate in each round of voting.
And the insincere voting Torrey refers to is nowhere near as simple to figure out as he makes it sound. Ranked-choice voting has, therefore, become the favored system of the bunch. Even the American Political Science Association uses it to elect their president.
Torrey also makes the claim that in the 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, which used ranked-choice voting, the winner did not receive a majority of the votes when, in fact, they did: 51.5%. That mayor became unpopular due to his later actions, and the losing side blamed ranked-choice voting for this, taking advantage of a low-turnout election to get their supporters to the polls to repeal it.
Unfortunately, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Majority rule and good government are American values, not “left-leaning” values, as Torrey asserts. Ranked-choice voting is therefore favored by citizens of all political persuasions, and it is endorsed by the Massachusetts League of Women Voters, Common Cause and other civic organizations.
Andy Anderson
Amherst