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RANKED-CHOICE DISASTER
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Harold Meyerson
September 17, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Coloradans and Nevadans will decide this fall on switching to a
form of voting that will chiefly benefit gazillionaire candidates. _
, David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Come Election Day, voters in a handful of states will not only make
clear who they’re voting for but also how they want to vote.
They’ll be presented with ballot measures that would move their
states to ranked-choice voting, in some states (most problematically,
Colorado and Nevada) combined, toxically, with jungle elections.
I’ve highlighted the toxicity of this combination because there’s
no surer way to diminish our already diminished political parties,
which provide us with our also diminished menus of ideological and
programmatic definition, than to convert our elections into
ranked-choice jungles. The only beneficiaries of this changeover would
appear to be very wealthy individuals or celebrities with indistinct
or concealed political profiles that would keep them from winning
party primaries. In fact, it’s just such gazillionaires who’ve
been funding these campaigns.
Jungle elections throw all the candidates together on the same ballot,
which can lead to a runoff between two candidates of the same party
(particularly if the other major party splits its votes among a passel
of pols) or allow one such gazillionaire (see above) to so outspend
the other candidates that he or she prevails despite tepid backing
from any party’s loyalists. Ranked-choice voting in a general
election, much less a jungle general election, also tends to favor
candidates with political profiles so mushy that they’re the third,
fourth, or fifth choice of the above-mentioned loyalists. Perfect for
celebrities, and not bad for gazillionaires, either.
That explains who’s behind the ballot measure in Colorado this year.
From 1999 to 2019, Kent Thiry was the CEO of DaVita
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corporation that provides kidney dialysis services, is basically
funded by Medicare, and controls a little over one-third of the entire
national market in dialysis provision. In three separate court actions
concerning DaVita’s conduct during Thiry’s tenure, the company was
fined well over $1 billion for unnecessarily disposing of drugs for
which it then fraudulently billed the government, providing kickbacks
to doctors who’d agreed to refer their patients to the company, and
wrongful death awards to the survivors of DaVita patients. Thiry has
the unusual distinction of having had an entire episode of John
Oliver’s _Last Week Tonight
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practices.
In recent years, Thiry has found a way into the public eye that
doesn’t involve being the butt of John Oliver’s riotous critique.
He’s become a force in Colorado politics, funding a
multimillion-dollar campaign for his initiative, which will be put to
voters this November, to establish a ranked-choice jungle voting
process that will enable him to run for governor in 2026 in the
absence of party primaries, which there’s no way he could possibly
win. To that end, he spent more than a million dollars on primary
races earlier this year to help elect legislators who wouldn’t
obstruct this changeover. Despite that, one Democratic state
representative, Emily Sirota, advanced a bill to amend November’s
ballot measure so that it only phased in the ranked-choice/jungle
combo in 12 municipalities that could serve as instructive pilot
programs for the switch. Her bill made it through the legislature, and
Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law.
Her bill was enacted chiefly because the combination of ranked choice
and jungle elections poses a clear threat to the kind of progressive
policies supported by the core Democratic Party institutions: unions,
environmental groups, and minority rights groups, almost all of which
have come together in Colorado to oppose that switch (also because
none of them would welcome a Thiry governorship). A similar coalition
has come together to oppose the kindred measure in Nevada.
The one way in which ranked-choice voting doesn’t weaken political
parties is when it’s used in party primaries. In New York City, for
instance, a host of progressive Democratic challengers have already
declared their intention to challenge Mayor Eric Adams in next
year’s Democratic primary for mayor. Those challengers will split
the considerable anti-Adams vote among them, creating the possibility
that Adams may be able to finish first despite claiming, say, just a
quarter of the vote. But because the city has ranked-choice voting in
its primaries, one of those challengers is virtually certain to come
out the winner, as none of the respective challengers’ supporters
are likely to cast second-, third-, or fourth-choice votes for Adams,
whose term in office is generally and rightly regarded as somewhere
between disgraceful and ridiculous.
Besides, there are far more effective ways to empower perspectives
that are outside those of our two major parties than ranked-choice
voting or jungle elections. Fusion voting, in which distinct parties
with distinct perspectives can back the same candidate (long a
practice in New York state) is one such way; proportional
representation elections is another. But given the current state of
American politics, in which celebrity can matter and money runs amok
(see, e.g., Donald Trump), the voting method being offered Coloradans
and Nevadans this November only deepens the descent of our political
process.
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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
* Ranked choice voting
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