When you have to choose between two idiots you're guaranteed to choose an idiot and that's the
problem with our electoral process. We have such polarizing politics that you're never going to
be happy with the candidates that are ending up at the top of the ticket. We need to really look
at the system in general, and how do you create candidates that really attract the minorities of
different principles and ideologies without ending up at the polar opposite ends of the spectrum?
Politics has gotten more and more polarizing and regardless of what side of the election you're on
you're feeling icky about the direction that it's going and part of the reason is when you have a
two-party system in a winner-take-all election process you're often stuck picking between
two options that don't feel really good to you. Luckily there's a new process called ranked choice
voting that aims to change all that. It makes the electoral process much less divisive, it makes it
easier to feel like your vote is always counted. Let's imagine we're picking where we want to eat.
We use a traditional winner take all process and we may have choices in candidates like: salad,
pizza, hamburger, hot dogs. When you run that process using a traditional winner take all model
the candidate that has the most votes will end up winning. In this case hamburgers has the most
votes but if you take a look at the results there are two candidates who had votes whose
votes were essentially discarded. So if you look at the bottom two candidates salad and hot dogs
their votes really didn't contribute to either the winning of the first
party or the second party. Now let's take a look at a ranked choice voting election
same idea in the first round you're really choosing who your favorite is. You're choosing
your favorite candidate of all the options but the thing that sets ranked choice voting apart is
you also choose your second and third option. What this means is if your first candidate doesn't win,
your vote doesn't get discarded. Your vote goes and trickles on to the second and third choices
that you've selected. So let's take a look at this in practice. In the first round of the election
we have the same results as the first time around in the winner-take-all election,
but the difference in rank-choice voting is that the winner is not called after the first round. We
don't have a majority win, so we don't have over 51 percent of the people voting for hamburgers
so what we do is we go on to the second round and for the second round we take the candidate
that had the least amount of votes and we look at who they voted for in their second position.
So in this case there was a lot more votes for pizza those votes didn't get discarded, and you
can see that now we have a tie between hamburger and pizza. So what we do is we look at the next
vote as well, so the least amount of votes is next carried by salad and when we discard that vote
those votes trickle on to the next stage as well. And now you can see that pizza had the majority of
votes having over 51 percent of the vote and so ranked choice voting is a really straightforward
process and it makes it much easier for your vote to feel counted. So i created a simple spreadsheet
to show ranked choice voting in example and so you can play around with this and see exactly how it
works. Here you can see the instant runoff and as you go through the instant runoff you eliminate
the vote with the least amount of votes. So here we have hot dog with the least amount of votes.
You can see in round two we have that tie again, we eliminate salad with the least amount of votes.
And again we have a majority winner in the third round. So you can see exactly how this
works and i've linked the spreadsheet in the description below. It ensures that your vote is
both counted and that politics is less polarizing. It encourages candidates to both be in the middle
and it encourages candidates to reach across the aisle and campaign in areas where they may not
win the traditional first vote but maybe they'll be the candidate for the second and third vote.
It makes it much less polarizing and encourages candidates to have positive campaigns,
which i think is a good thing in general too. So ranked choice voting does a great job
of encouraging people to vote for who their true favorite candidate is and it also ensures
that by doing so they're not throwing away their vote. Ranked choice voting isn't a new concept
it's actually been around since the 1800s it was brought over to the states but it hasn't really
gained a lot of popularity until more recently. Over the last couple years it started to trickle
into more and more elections and now you're seeing in counties, municipalities, cities,
states, congressional races, state races, and even this year in Maine they're using it for
the presidential election as well. Ranked choice voting is a great step in making politics less
divisive and more inclusive. I'm really excited about ranked choice voting. It was on the ballot
this year for Massachusetts and regardless of who you're voting for make sure you vote! i'm Greg
Raiz. I talk about technology entrepreneurship and design. I'll catch you on the next one!