Gov. Ned Lamont and some good-government activists want Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting. This is the mechanism of “instant runoff” elections in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Candidates receiving the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are transferred to the remaining candidates in accordance with voter preferences until one candidate achieves a majority, not a mere plurality.
Under ranked-choice voting people still get only one vote but are allowed to change it prospectively.
The governor has appointed a group to study the issue.
Ranked-choice voting might get complicated with an office for which there were many candidates, but it would be pretty simple where there were only three or four.
Building a majority for the winner is the great virtue of ranked-choice voting. It works against candidates who represent extremes but who might win if a moderate majority is divided among two or more candidates.
In recent decades Connecticut has had some notable elections that had three or more candidates and whose winners well may not have won a runoff.
There was the 1994 election for governor, a four-way race won by John G. Rowland, a Republican, with only 36% of the vote, the total vote being split by minor-party liberal and minor-party conservative candidates.
The state’s election for U.S. senator in 1970 was won by Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Republican, with only 42% of the vote, as the Democratic vote was split by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd’s independent candidacy after his party rejected him for embezzling campaign funds.
Those elections are reasons for Connecticut Democrats and liberals particularly to aspire to ranked-choice voting. But Connecticut Republicans and conservatives have a reason to aspire to it as well, though they haven’t realized it yet.
That reason is Connecticut’s Working Families Party, which exists to push the Democratic Party to the left. The Working Families Party ordinarily cross-endorses Democrats who lean left but will threaten to run its own candidates against Democrats who aren’t leftist enough, thus splitting the Democratic vote and aiding Republicans. Ranked-choice voting would eliminate the Working Families Party’s leverage over Democrats, since people voting for a Working Families candidate almost certainly would list the Democratic candidate as their second choice over any Republican. Then moderate Democrats wouldn’t have to worry about the far-left party anymore.
Meanwhile Connecticut has no far-right minor party to threaten Republican candidates in the same way. (Neighboring New York has both liberal and conservative minor parties that exist to push the major parties left and right, respectively.)
Indeed, with ranked-choice voting no major-party candidates would not have to worry about any “spoiler” candidates anymore.
Unfortunately, a week after the recent election a report from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers indicated that the state isn’t ready for ranked-choice voting and may not even be fully competent to hold ordinary elections.
Hearst’s investigation found that at least six municipalities reported to the secretary of the state voting data with gross mistakes — like more votes cast than registered voters and even more precincts reporting than real precincts. As might have been expected, Hartford failed in both respects, reporting more precincts than it had and more voters participating than votes cast.
Hearst’s investigation noticed these errors before election officials did.
There was no suggestion of corruption here, just negligence, but it may be chronic. For the Hearst report added, “Last year Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas traveled to East Haven more than 2½ months after Connecticut’s municipal elections to bestow an award for high voter turnout, only to learn that the apparent large number of voters was due to a data-entry error.”
Running an election can be exhausting, and registrars and their aides are often heroic. Connecticut’s recent conversion to early voting may make things harder. But before Connecticut tries revolutionizing more of its voting procedures, it should perfect the current ones. That’s the study group the governor should appoint.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.