ILYA SHLYAKHTER

Cambridge, Mass.

To the Editor: Howard Dean extols ranked-choice voting without mentioning its antidemocratic features. The most serious is that it is “non-monotonic,” which means a voter can raise the ranking of a candidate, even to first place, and by doing so cause him to lose because of anomalies in the transfer of votes as candidates are sequentially eliminated. This is not a rare event but can happen surprisingly often in close elections. If there is anything antithetical to a democracy, it’s that giving more support to a candidate should hurt rather than help.

Mr. Dean mistakenly thinks that ranked-choice voting supports the principle of majority rule. But this is not true, even when the sequential elimination of weaker candidates whittles the number down to two. The reason is that voters who supported weaker candidates can have all their preferred candidates eliminated, so in the end these voters are not counted in the contest between the final two.

These and related problems cropped up in the 2009 mayoral race in Burlington, Vt., which had adopted ranked-choice voting. Burlington voters voted to repeal it, as have voters in other cities that had similar unfortunate experiences. Moreover, countries like Australia that have long used ranked-choice voting have remained essentially two-party systems.

It makes no sense to adopt a fundamentally flawed voting system when there are simpler alternatives, like approval voting, that do not suffer from such failures and would facilitate the entry of new candidates and parties.

STEVEN J. BRAMS

New York

The writer is a professor of politics at New York University.

To the Editor: Howard Dean’s suggestion that the United States should adopt ranked-choice voting is long overdue. Australia, whose electoral system I have studied extensively, has used ranked choice for almost a hundred years.

Beyond giving voters the ability to take a chance on a third party, ranked choice would immediately defuse the toxic polarization of our national political scene by psychologically reframing how we see the choices we face. Replacing our red-versus-blue Armageddon with something more nuanced would make us a less angry country almost overnight.

Ranked choice would also make voting more complicated; this could overwhelm some voters and depress turnout. Australia deals with this problem effectively by combining mandatory voting with some ingenious procedures that simplify the decision process while preserving an enviable level of freedom of choice. We would do well to learn from Australia’s example.