To the Editor:
The Connecticut General Assembly is currently considering legislation to allow for the use of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in political party primaries and caucuses, and municipal elections. Let’s be very clear: there are far more challenges and problems facing Connecticut related to the use of RCV than any possible benefit.
Today, Connecticut’s voting system is simple and straight forward. A voter colors in the bubble for their candidate, puts the ballot into the voting machine and their vote is cast. Rank Choice Voting is far from simple and straight forward. It is extremely complex, time-consuming and confusing for voters and has more potential to disenfranchise voters than to ensure a better result.
With RCV, voters would need to “rank” multiple candidates in the voter’s order of preference for the candidate to “win” the election. This so called “ranking” would require a deeper understanding of each candidate’s positions and platform, as well as knowing all the candidates on the ballot The ballot becomes much more complicated and longer in size. In an average size Connecticut town, the Registrar of Voters created a municipal election ballot using RCV, the ballot was 11 pages long. This complicated and confusing ballot would open the door for errors in voting or worse, having voters walk away and not completing the ballot, resulting in what is known as “ballot exhaustion.” We need voters to have their voices heard and counted, not a system where a voter’s vote is not counted because the voter has not voted far enough down the ranking to have a say in the outcome or the voter has incorrectly marked the ballot, or the voter walks away from voting because the ballot is overly complicated or lengthy. It has been proven that less-informed voters and non-English speakers were less likely to rank all candidates, leading to lower turnout and disenfranchisement among these groups.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong issued an opinion that RCV would violate our state constitution. He noted that our state has never used RCV, and the constitution does not mention it, suggesting that such a change could be legally problematic. Connecticut’s Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas recently offered the following testimony to the Government Administration and Elections Committee on legislation to implement RCV in voting – “I stand in opposition of this bill and urge the committee to carefully consider the responsibilities the legislation would place on election authorities, including the Secretary of the State and local officials”.
Connecticut’s current system of electing our representatives has served us well for many centuries. It is straightforward, easy to understand and, most importantly, produces clear outcomes. Before we change a system that has worked well for us since our founding, the legislature must address existing issues, such as implementing mandatory minimum prison sentences for people who violate our election laws, updating our laws to ensure that our voter records are up to date, providing the Secretary of the State and our local election officials with the resources to improve voter education, providing resources to improve how long it takes to get election results and, most importantly, ensuring that voters have confidence in the election process.
Proponents of RCV claim RCV will improve our electoral process, however, the potential drawbacks—a more complicated and expensive voting system, voter disenfranchisement, legal challenges, unintended electoral outcomes, longer period of time to determine who won the election, thereby causing voters to question outcomes, suggest that Rank Choice Voting is not the right choice for Connecticut.
Only a handful of towns have had the opportunity to “test” our new optical scanner machines, which, by all admission, including the Secretary of the State, are slower than our current voting machines. We just instituted an entirely new concept to Connecticut’s elections, early voting, and to now implement a Rank Choice Voting, a system that has proven problematic everywhere it has been used, would be irresponsible, will result in voter frustration and, most importantly, will lead to voter disenfranchisement, particularly among the most vulnerable of our voters.
There’s an old saying – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Rank Choice Voting is a bad solution in search of a problem. The legislature must move on from this bad idea and start to focus on real problems and ensuring voters have confidence in our elections.
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Ben Proto is the Connecticut Republican State Chairman