Our experiment showed at least one thing: Some people love ranked-choice voting

By DAVID BROOKS
Monitor staff
Published: 12/9/2019 4:49:58 PM

When the Monitor decided to run a mock Democratic primary using ranked-choice voting, there were two numbers I was particularly interested in seeing.
Here is one of them: 385.
That’s how many usable ballots were mailed in, and it’s a lot. It’s about three times as many as I expected and one of the biggest mail-in responses the Monitor has seen in ages. We even beat Letters to Santa!
To me, this answered the biggest concern about ranked-choice voting: That the complexity will turn off voters. It seems the opposite happened.
I have heard just one negative reader comment about the enormous 16x16 grid, but more than a dozen readers included notes with their ballots expressing enthusiasm, including one who scribbled, “Thanks – this is great!” at the bottom.

Here’s the other number I was interested in: 14.
That’s the number of rounds it took to reduce our original 16 candidates to the point where one of them had a majority of the ballots.
Yes, it’s a lot. In fact, it’s the maximum number possible with 16 candidates, reflecting how divided our readers were about the huge Democratic field.

(snip …)

There were also 19 ballots that didn’t get counted at all later in the process because they left some candidates un-ranked and all their choices were eliminated.
That brings to mind a third interesting number: 156. This is how many ballots ranked all 16 candidates, not skipping anybody.
In other words, more than half of our readers did not have an opinion about everybody on the ballot. Usually, such voters marked the top four or five and left the rest empty – although a few jumped just over the middle rankings and marked one or two candidates at the very bottom, to indicate their displeasure.

And the winner is …

Eventually, we got down to just three candidates who had 152, 126 and 104 votes respectively. We parceled out the 104 votes to the other two. It turned out voters who liked this candidate – Amy Klobuchar, if you must know – had a very strong preference, so almost all of them went to the eventual winner.
The final tally was 224 votes for Pete Buttigieg and 142 for Elizabeth Warren.
Here’s the twist: It was Buttigieg who got the 102 No. 1 votes, meaning he also would have won the election with traditional enumeration. To an extent, the hours that Sarah and I spent moving ballots around and counting and re-counting didn’t change a thing.
It did make one change: Warren was originally in fourth place but was boosted to second because virtually all of Bernie Sanders’ voters chose her as No. 2. This affection didn’t go the other way, however: Warren voters split their No. 2 among a whole host of alternatives.