A Milestone for Improving America's Elections

At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin this past weekend, there was a panel discussion to highlight the work of a new organization, Better Choices, devoted to the promotion of the electoral principle known to scholars as Condorcet Voting and frequently discussed here at Common Ground Democracy. (Disclosure: I’m on the advisory board for Better Choices.) The panel included Eric Maskin, the Harvard professor who won a Nobel Prize in Economics and has devoted much work to Condorcet Voting (and with whom I’m honored to have co-authored a primer on the topic) and Joe Manchin, the former Senator from West Virginia.

Better Choices has decided to use the term “Consensus Choice Voting” to describe Condorcet Voting, given the need to call it something other than “Condorcet Voting” in order to explain it to the general public. Indeed, it was impressive that during the hour-long panel discussion of this electoral principle the name “Condorcet” was not uttered once (as I recall).

Professor Maskin used a slide to illustrate how Consensus Choice Voting works and why it is the electoral method best suited for identifying a candidate whom a majority of voters prefer over each other candidate in an election:

The slide contained a simple hypothetical example of an election with three candidates: Blue, Purple, and Red (the kind of example we’ve been using since the inception of Common Ground Democracy). In this example, 44% of voters prefer Blue to Purple and Purple to Red, 41% of voters prefer the candidates in the opposite order, favoring Red over Purple and Purple over Blue, and the remaining 15% in the middle like Purple best and Red second-best.

Professor Maskin observed that if the election was governed by the plurality-winner rule, as most American elections are, then Blue would win, as 44% is the largest plurality. He then explained that if the election was conducted using Instant Runoff Voting, which is the most prevalent method of Ranked Choice Voting, then Red would win: Instant Runoff Voting eliminates the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes, which in this example is Purple, and then redistributes all the ballots that ranked Purple first to the candidate ranked second on those ballots, who is Red; after this redistribution, Red has 56% (41% + 15%) and thus beats Blue.

Finally, Professor Maskin showed that Consensus Choice Voting would conduct head-to-head comparisons for each pair of candidates. These head-to-head comparisons, derived from determining for every ballot which of each pair was ranked above the other, would reveal that Purple beats Blue 56% to 44% and Purple beats Red 59% to 41%. While Red would beat Blue 56% to 44% in the third head-to-head comparison, which is the same result as produced by Instant Runoff Voting, Consensus Choice Voting declares Purple the winner because Purple won both head-to-head comparisons and thus is preferred by a majority of voters over each of the other two candidates. As Professor Maskin summed up the point of the example, Consensus Choice Voting finds the candidate whom a majority truly favor over each alternative, and thus Consensus Choice Voting is a superior electoral method to either the prevailing plurality-winner rule or Instant Runoff Voting.

What was most significant about the panel discussion is what happened after Professor Maskin finished his presentation of this example. It was unclear to me whether Senator Manchin had ever heard of Condorcet Voting beforehand, but he immediately embraced Consensus Choice Voting as a better way to determine the will of the majority. He himself called Consensus Choice Voting (as Professor Maskin described it) an improved version of Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV 2.0. Senator Manchin clearly understood that Consensus Choice Voting elects the candidate who is able to generate the broadest support within the electorate and thus is the best antidote to partisan polarization.

After the panel discussion wrapped up, Senator Manchin posted on Instagram and X that we should be “designing an election system that really reflects the will of the people” and that the winner should have majority support.” He added that he was pleased to participate on the panel and its discussion of “consensus choice voting” among other “solutions that would give voters a greater voice in the outcome of elections, including open primaries … and nonpartisan redistricting.”

It is significant that Senator Manchin, given his extensive experience in politics (having served as West Virginia’s governor and Secretary of State, as well as in both chambers of its legislature, before becoming a US Senator), would embrace Consensus Choice Voting and potentially become an ambassador for it. He instantly recognized what a difference it would make to the composition of Congress if it were used for congressional elections. Hopefully, he can convince other former Senators who also prematurely ended their Senate careers because of the inability of the existing electoral system to identify the will of the majority under conditions of accelerating polarization—former Senators like Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and (soon) Tom Tillis, among others—to embrace Consensus Choice Voting and build momentum for its adoption.

The more there are people like Joe Manchin who recognize that Consensus Choice Voting is the cure for what ails American politics, the greater the likelihood of implementing the cure. There is still a long way to go before Consensus Choice Voting becomes operative for any congressional election, but this past weekend’s panel discussion was an important step towards that goal. To my knowledge, Joe Manchin is the first politician of his statute to publicly embrace Condorcet Voting (or whatever we call it) as the principle upon which elections should be based.

As someone who has been advocating for Condorcet Voting since January of 2021, I view last weekend’s panel as a very significant development. The concept of Condorcet Voting has now entered public discourse in a way it hadn’t before. Now it is necessary to move that discussion forward even more.