Part 9: Expanding and Reforming Voting
Part 9 of a series on my priorities as a first-time candidate for Cambridge City Council. Next: Part 10: Public Safety, Infrastructure, and Closing
I support advocating for the provision of 24-hour voting, which involves instituting a 24-hour period during which residents with less typical working hours (e.g., service workers, artists, etc.) can vote in person in addition to existing regular and early voting options. The city should also advocate for automatic and/or same-day voter registration as well as extend no excuse vote-by-mail as an option indefinitely.
Five Star Voting
Cambridge’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system is a substantial improvement over traditional voting. Nevertheless, the process of determining who actually wins in RCV is generally unintelligible to the average voter as well as bizarre in that it incorporates an element of random chance. This means that a vote recount of a perfectly valid RCV election result can produce a different electoral outcome in a way that is equally valid. So, although RCV certainly surpasses traditional voting, it doesn’t score points for transparency or accessibility to average people nor to public confidence in the final election result.
I propose advocating for “five star voting,” which involves simply rating each candidate out of five stars (with unrated candidates getting a default 2.5 stars). This way, we are free from worrying about similar candidates “splitting the vote” and have the benefit of a system whose result is both not subject to chance and easy to understand: Winners are simply determined by taking average ratings and selecting the highest.
A side benefit of this system is that elections could reveal more nuance in voter preferences. For example, we could see which candidates are most polarizing (rated most often either one or five stars) or most frequently unrated. This is actually of great public value, as it enables our government to better understand the revealed political and policy preferences of our populace and perhaps better respond to underlying needs.
I am not aware of anywhere that uses this system or that has proposed the concept before. In embracing our role as a forward-thinking city, however, I see no reason why Cambridge should not be first to test it, perhaps initially via informal polling. Perhaps we can inspire other governments — most interestingly, those dominated by our two major political parties — in which voting honestly for an independent candidate will no longer be a vote thrown away.
This advantage — also enjoyed by the RCV system — is impactful. In governments dominated by two major parties, opening the doors for third party candidates dismantles some of the immense concentrations of power among party leaders. Currently, these leaders often dictate how all other members of their party vote, and, more often than not, they fall in line. Power is condensed into the hands of a few in a way antithetical to how the system should work, resulting in increasing partisan division and the conversion of many elected officials into sheep. We need more third party officials not beholden to such structures who are free to vote in line with their true beliefs. Only in this way can we enable democracy to function properly.
