March 12, 2019, will go down in Massachusetts electoral history for two things: being a distressing day for the populace of Fall River, recalling and re-electing their infamous mayor on the same ballot; and being a historic day for the movement for ranked choice voting, empirically demonstrating in a single moment why simple plurality voting does not demonstrate the true will of the people.
When Jasiel Correia was first elected, he gained publicity for becoming Fall River’s youngest mayor, elected at age 23, and was portrayed as a quintessential member of a wave of young politicians elected to bring fresh ideas and new energy to struggling, aging cities. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, no one as young as Correia had ever before run a city as large as Fall River.
A few years later he again drew national attention, but this time it for legal troubles concerning the development of his SnoOwl app. After declining a request by the City Council to resign, a recall election was scheduled and, as required by City Charter, an election for his possible successor.
The election is behind us now, and, as many locals are aware, a majority of voters (61 percent) elected to remove Correia from office. Like many decisive events in history, the rhetorical value of this election comes from an obscure detail in the law: in this case election law that enabled Correia to run for mayor on the same ballot on which he was being recalled.
Even though the majority of voters were in favor of the recall, Fall River, like most jurisdictions, only requires a plurality of votes—that’s fancy talk for more votes than your opponents—to be elected into office. (In contrast, a simple majority requires at least 51 percent support.) For this reason, it was entirely foreseeable that with multiple candidates dividing up the voters who expressed their desire to remove Correia from office, the minority of voters that opposed his recall could be enough to retain it.
This is exactly what happened on Tuesday in Fall River. Correia faced four opponents who divided up the anti-Correia consensus — a phenomena referred to a vote-splitting. The top alternative candidate received nearly 33.6 percent of the vote, which was just shy of enough votes to defeat Correia, who received 35.4 percent. Yet, how can anyone in this situation say that the voters chose Correia? On the previous ballot question, a large majority (61 percent) explicitly chose to remove Correia from office.
It can be argued that there are other ways Fall River could have prevented this from happening, but that’s besides the point. Under plurality voting systems, minority rule is always a realistic possibility. However, voting systems can and do sometimes change. Reflecting the times of ages past when technological limitations restricted the forms our elections could take, the basic mechanics of how we choose a winner are entirely open to reform. Ranked choice voting is one option for reform. It eliminates vote-splitting and the spoiler effect and would have almost certainly resulted in a different outcome in Tuesday’s recall election in the Scholarship City.
As the name implies, in ranked choice voting, voters rank as many candidates as they want in order of preference. If any candidate has a majority (more than half) of the first preference votes, then that candidate is elected. Otherwise, an “instant runoff” occurs, which begins by removing the weakest candidate and transferring ballots cast for them to the voters’ second choices.
In this case, all of the voters that wanted to oust Correia could have voiced their support for more than one of his challengers. Thus, the true consensus candidate would have emerged from an assemblage of top choice and secondary or tertiary choice votes. While it is possible that some people who voted to recall Correia would list him as a second or third choice, my bet is on no. Which leads to another point; under Ranked Choice Voting we have full information on the preferences of voters, no guessing required, bringing us closer to a truly democratic system.
Elise Rapoza is a senior research associate at the Public Policy Center at UMass Dartmouth.