This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
I’m a fan of ranked-choice voting. I think it’s a fairer way to decide elections than the more common method, in which each person can vote for only a first choice.
The 2000 presidential election highlighted the problem with this first-choice system. That year, more Floridians preferred Al Gore to George W. Bush. But Bush won, because some of the people who preferred Gore to Bush voted for Ralph Nader as their first choice.
In ranked-choice voting, people can list multiple candidates, in order of preference. If your first choice isn’t among the top two vote-getters, your later choices start to matter. And the method has been catching on in recent years. Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand all use it for some elections. The state of Maine has also started using it, and a congressional race last year turned on voters’ second choices.
Now there is another way in which ranked choice could be useful: Solving the Brexit mess.
Brexit is at a standstill because none of the options has the support of a majority of Parliament (or, it seems, of the British people). Yesterday, Parliament voted on eight different proposals under which Britain could leave the European Union. None got a majority. Prime Minister Theresa May has even offered to resign if Parliament passes her plan, knowing that would appeal to many members of Parliament. In previous votes, the May plan hasn’t come close to passing.
So some observers have begun calling for a ranked-choice solution. In effect, it would winnow down the options to the two most popular and then force Parliament to choose between them. “The great virtue of this voting system,” Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge University economist, writes in The Financial Times, “is that it results in an outcome that is truly the majority winner.” Part of the idea, as Ian Dunt, the editor of politics.co.uk, has written, is “creating a process where tolerable compromises can be found.”
Notably, one of the only proposals that came closest to passing yesterday was a kind of meta option, calling for the British people to get an up-or-down vote on any plan Parliament ultimately passed. It’s a sign of how far Parliament remains from agreeing on the substance of Brexit.
I’ll confess to being torn about my hopes here. On the one hand, I think ranked-choice voting is a fair way for Parliament to find the most acceptable version of Brexit. On the other, I wouldn’t mind if Parliament were to find any acceptable version and then put the entire matter before the British public for a re-vote.
Related: On the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and I talk about how to replace the Electoral College, and one option is a national popular vote with ranked choice. We also debate the meaning of the Mueller investigation — and who should be feeling vindicated by it.
College diversity, on film
For anyone interested in economic diversity in higher education — as I am — I recommend a new film that follows three high school students in Brooklyn as they try to navigate the application process. It’s called “Personal Statement” and is directed by Juliane Dressner. It’s available for renting on Amazon or iTunes.
The film feels particularly timely in the wake of the college admissions scandal. The experiences of the three students in “Personal Statement” are much closer to the American norm than the elite world of, say, the Georgetown tennis team.
One of the film’s students, Enoch Jemmott, who’s now a senior at Queens College, has an Op-Ed in The Times this morning. In it, he describes the hurdles that lower-income students face, from the lack of a single college counselor at many high schools to the byzantine misery of financial aid forms.
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
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Opinion | Shambles
This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
I’m a fan of ranked-choice voting. I think it’s a fairer way to decide elections than the more common method, in which each person can vote for only a first choice.
The 2000 presidential election highlighted the problem with this first-choice system. That year, more Floridians preferred Al Gore to George W. Bush. But Bush won, because some of the people who preferred Gore to Bush voted for Ralph Nader as their first choice.
In ranked-choice voting, people can list multiple candidates, in order of preference. If your first choice isn’t among the top two vote-getters, your later choices start to matter. And the method has been catching on in recent years. Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand all use it for some elections. The state of Maine has also started using it, and a congressional race last year turned on voters’ second choices.
Now there is another way in which ranked choice could be useful: Solving the Brexit mess.
Brexit is at a standstill because none of the options has the support of a majority of Parliament (or, it seems, of the British people). Yesterday, Parliament voted on eight different proposals under which Britain could leave the European Union. None got a majority. Prime Minister Theresa May has even offered to resign if Parliament passes her plan, knowing that would appeal to many members of Parliament. In previous votes, the May plan hasn’t come close to passing.
So some observers have begun calling for a ranked-choice solution. In effect, it would winnow down the options to the two most popular and then force Parliament to choose between them. “The great virtue of this voting system,” Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge University economist, writes in The Financial Times, “is that it results in an outcome that is truly the majority winner.” Part of the idea, as Ian Dunt, the editor of politics.co.uk, has written, is “creating a process where tolerable compromises can be found.”
Notably, one of the only proposals that came closest to passing yesterday was a kind of meta option, calling for the British people to get an up-or-down vote on any plan Parliament ultimately passed. It’s a sign of how far Parliament remains from agreeing on the substance of Brexit.
I’ll confess to being torn about my hopes here. On the one hand, I think ranked-choice voting is a fair way for Parliament to find the most acceptable version of Brexit. On the other, I wouldn’t mind if Parliament were to find any acceptable version and then put the entire matter before the British public for a re-vote.
Related: On the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and I talk about how to replace the Electoral College, and one option is a national popular vote with ranked choice. We also debate the meaning of the Mueller investigation — and who should be feeling vindicated by it.
College diversity, on film
For anyone interested in economic diversity in higher education — as I am — I recommend a new film that follows three high school students in Brooklyn as they try to navigate the application process. It’s called “Personal Statement” and is directed by Juliane Dressner. It’s available for renting on Amazon or iTunes.
The film feels particularly timely in the wake of the college admissions scandal. The experiences of the three students in “Personal Statement” are much closer to the American norm than the elite world of, say, the Georgetown tennis team.
One of the film’s students, Enoch Jemmott, who’s now a senior at Queens College, has an Op-Ed in The Times this morning. In it, he describes the hurdles that lower-income students face, from the lack of a single college counselor at many high schools to the byzantine misery of financial aid forms.
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
Source: Read Full Article