Yale group pushing for ranked-choice voting system

A gate to Branford College, one of the 14 residential colleges at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It is on High Street. A gate to Branford College, one of the 14 residential colleges at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It is on High Street. Photo: Ed Stannard / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Ed Stannard / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Yale group pushing for ranked-choice voting system 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN — The 2020 presidential election could turn out to be the year that young voters make the difference.

The Yale University chapter of Every Vote Counts, a nationwide nonpartisan student network, is working to make sure more members of their generation register and make their voices heard in the voting booth.

And at Yale, they’re in the vanguard of making sure voters’ preferences are heard, helping to get ranked-choice voting approved for this year’s elections for officers of the Yale College Council, which represents undergraduates.

Nationally in 2018, about 31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted on Nov. 6, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, 10 points higher than in 2014, the last midterm election, and the highest rate of young voter turnout in a quarter century.

Those voters from Generation Z, as those born after 1996 have come to be known, chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives over Republicans by a 2-1 margin, CIRCLE reported, which “almost certainly helped” Democrats take over the House, according to its website.

Harold Ekeh, who co-founded Yale’s Every Vote Counts chapter in 2017, is president of the national executive board. His co-founder, Thomas Rosenkranz, a 2016 Yale graduate, is also on the national board.

The chapter got 1,100 students to commit to vote in 2018, including 800 first-time voters. “On Election Day itself … we went into every single entryway on the campus and put up posters,” Ekeh said. “At City Hall, they didn’t anticipate the high amount of interest.”

New voters who wanted to register on Election Day had to do so at City Hall, and at 4 p.m., “individuals were being told to turn away and go home,” said Ekeh, a senior and Nigerian immigrant who lives in Elmont, New York. “That was active voter disenfranchisement.”

“If you’re in line by 8 o’clock, they can’t tell you to go home, but sometimes they do,” said Phil Hinkes, a sophomore from Chicago who is president of Yale’s chapter. “Through our efforts, hundreds of people got to vote on Election Day.”

The energy behind getting students to vote is high at Yale, which, Hinkes said “is the first chapter so we are the most active chapter.” The chapter counts 80 members in its ranks.

Yale’s chapter is looking beyond New Haven, however.

“We’re dedicated to increasing voter turnout nationwide and expanding voter access through civic education, legislative advocacy and voter engagement,” Ekeh said. The group is advocating for early voting and voter registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles, both of which are on Secretary of the State Denise Merrill’s agenda.

Ekeh got involved in increasing voter participation when he was interning with the Congressional Black Caucus in the summer of 2017 and found that “23 states had passed laws that were meant to suppress voting rights.” When he arrived at Yale that fall, Ekeh found that Yale students voted at a lower rate in 2014 than those at Harvard University.

Now, through Every Vote Counts’ efforts, TurboVote, an online app that allows voter registration in two minutes and keeps track of absentee and vote-by-mail rules in every state, was incorporated into Yale’s Student Information System.

“The goal is to integrate into the first-year onboarding — register for classes, register to vote. Very simple,” Ekeh said. That’s important for students in a digital age who have to get absentee ballots if they want to vote in their hometowns. “A lot of them don’t know how to use stamps and envelopes,” he said.

“You have to Google where the stamp goes,” Hinkes said.

Every Vote Counts has been putting its efforts especially into ranked-choice voting, a system that allows voters to list candidates in multiple-candidate elections by preference, eliminating the concern that voting for a third-party candidate will take votes away from the Democrat or Republican who may be more likely to win.

Also known as “instant runoff,” the system is used to elect the Australian Parliament, the president of Ireland, mayors of London, San Francisco and Portland, Maine, as well as on 50 college campuses, according to instantrunoff.com and fairvote.org. It’s also the system used to nominate and pick winners for the Academy Awards.

In traditional elections (though not the vote for president, in which the Electoral College is used), the candidate with the most votes may win with a plurality but less than a majority. The winner is “first past the post,” Hinkes said.

There were 14 candidates in Chicago’s Feb. 26 mayoral election, with the highest two vote-getters, Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle, moving on to an April 2 runoff. Lightfoot received 17.54 percent of the vote and Preckwinkle won 16.04 percent, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

Under ranked-choice voting, the candidate with the least number of votes would have been eliminated and his votes distributed to his voters’ second-choice candidate. The process would continue until one candidate gained a majority.

“If you don’t want to vote for a candidate, you don’t have to,” said Lucy McCurdy, vice president of Yale’s chapter of Every Vote Counts. “This allows you to vote for third parties without throwing away your vote. … It reduces polarization because you’re also competing for people’s second-choice vote.”

Hinkes said the system eliminates “strategic voting,” in which voters choose the candidate they believe will win rather than the one whose policies they most agree with. “It incentivizes instead to look for common ground,” he said.

“There’s typically less negative attack ads,” said McCurdy, a sophomore from Washington, D.C., who is registered in Connecticut and voted at the Ives Memorial Library in November. She added that the biggest obstacle to implementing the system is educating voters that it is fair. Hinkes said that in Minnesota, where it is used to elect the mayors and city councils in Minneapolis and St. Paul, more than 95 percent of voters like the system.

Those who oppose the system “think that you’re giving voters more than one vote, which you’re not,” he said. “The ballot isn’t necessarily who the voters are voting for, it’s just giving who their preferences are.”

In the 2000 presidential election, in which Florida’s electoral votes decided the election in favor of George W. Bush, the recount gave Bush 2,912,790 votes, 48.847 percent, to Vice President Al Gore’s 2,912,253 or 48.838 percent. Many have blamed third-place finisher Ralph Nader, a Winsted native who received 97,488 votes, for taking votes from Gore.

There were seven other candidates on the Florida ballot with 40,575 votes total, so if ranked-choice voting had been used, all those candidates’ votes, split between Bush and Gore, would not have been enough to give either a majority and Nader’s votes would have come into play.

Hinkes said voter apathy and suppression, with voters being removed from the rolls for various reasons, is another big problem. “I think if you look at 2016, the total votes between Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was 78,000 that decided that election, and 120 million people didn’t vote or couldn’t vote. That’s basically the size of Darien, Connecticut, deciding the leader of the free world, and that is kind of crazy,” he said.

“Voting is the best way to be represented in our government and, no matter what issues you care about, voting is the best way to make your voice heard,” McCurdy said.

Turnout doesn’t match enthusiasm

But while young people are “some of the most engaged voters … their level of enthusiasm is not reflected in their voting level,” Hinkes said. “How do we get their level of turnout to match their enthusiasm?” he asked. Accomplishing that is Every Vote Counts’ mission.

According to Hinkes, the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created Pell grants and other government scholarships, contained “a provision … that said universities need to make a good-faith effort to register students.”

He said Northwestern University “is like the gold standard for voting.” The Evanston, Illinois, school requires students to opt out of registering, so “close to 99 percent” of students are registered, he said.

“I think Yale students in general want to vote and will vote when it’s not unnecessarily difficult,” McCurdy said. “There’s all these things that get in the way, like missed deadlines and misinformation that Every Vote Counts is well situated to address.”

One issue is the high number of out-of-state students at Yale and confusion about where to vote and whether registering in Connecticut cancels an out-of-state registration, because “states aren’t good at talking to each other,” Hinkes said.

“The thing that we always say is, ‘Just vote once,’” McCurdy added.

The Yale students understand how important the right to vote is and how it is threatened. Hinkes referred to the Supreme Court case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which an Alabama county succeeded in having a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 struck down as unconstitutional.

“That was something that people got beaten up and tear-gassed for,” Hinkes said of the 1965 law. “It was something that a generation of activists fought for to make the Declaration of Independence, that ‘all men are created equal’ … a reality. To just have five justices strike that down 50 years later because it was ‘outdated’ … that was untenable.”

Getting ranked-choice voting approved for five elected officers of the Yale College Council was Every Vote Counts’ most recent achievement. Council Vice President Heidi Dong, who oversees elections, met with the group and was persuaded that it would be both fairer and easier than the system used in the past. That system required a candidate who doesn’t win a majority to have 40 percent of the vote and at least five percentage points more than the second-leading candidate or, if less than 40 percent, more than 10 percentage points more than the nearest candidate. Otherwise there would be a runoff.

“We found that it works but it’s definitely difficult to run,” said Dong, a junior from Peoria, Illinois. She and YCC President Saloni Rao presented the plan to the council Senate, which is made up of two members from each of Yale’s 14 residential colleges. “Everyone seemed pretty supportive,” Dong said. “I’m definitely excited to see how it turns out.”

She said she hopes Yale will start a trend within the Ivy League.

One of the challenges was technical. “We started out with a simple Excel file with manual counting,” said Saul Roselaar, a sophomore from Appleton, Wisconsin, and Every Vote Counts’ legislative director. “Then one night I just sat down and wrote an R algorithm.” R is an open-source computer-programming language. He then worked with the council “to draft an explanation of ranked-choice voting and the new voting system for candidates to use,” he said.

Dong said the number of candidates can vary. “Some years we have as many as five for a position, some years fewer.” The registration deadline for candidates for next year’s board is April 4 and the election will be held April 11 and 12. Dong and Rao won’t be running for re-election. Traditionally, the president and vice president of the YCC are juniors.

Rao, a junior from Washington, D.C., said, “On a small scale I’m just really happy that the Yale College Council was able to be a part of pioneering this change,” which she hopes “will be a springboard to extend ranked-choice voting to elections in the local, state and federal level.”

edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382.