India was one of the few countries to choose democracy and universal adult franchise right at the time of her independence. In the 74 years that have passed and the several elections conducted throughout the Indian State, there has always been a peaceful transfer of power - the primary purpose of conducting elections in a democracy. Yet there is a scope for improvement. It is time to reflect - has choosing an electoral democracy with the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system served us well? Can we do better? Not much attention has been paid to the voting system we have chosen. Many countries have experimented with new voting systems that address the limitations of FPTP and suit their context. This article intends to provoke the reader to think of an alternative to FPTP - Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
Limitations of FPTP
The FPTP voting system is not designed to select the candidate with majority support. Rather, a candidate needs to gather just one vote more than the closest rival to win the elections in the FPTP system. Consequently, in a multi-cornered election, the mandate gets fragmented and the chances of the elected candidate being voted by a majority of the voters decreases. This shapes the voter preference and political strategy of the parties. Voters prefer to vote for the candidate who has a ‘winning potential’. The voter may have a higher preference for a less popular candidate. However, the voter does not want to ‘waste’ his/her vote for a ‘losing candidate’ and consequently votes for the less preferred but higher winning potential candidate. This is also called ‘tactical voting’. The FPTP voting system also has an impact on the party campaign strategy - parties often resort to negative campaigning/personal attacks to cut the votes of the other parties. This can degrade the election discourse that only highlights the limitations of opposing candidates. Most importantly, the FPTP system incentivises a divisive strategy. Parties focus on dividing the constituents along various identities - caste, sub-caste, religion, geography, gender, language etc. - and claim to represent one or more of them. Fault lines are sometimes also created and cracked open. The hope is that the constituents a party claims to represent should beat the closest rival at the ballot box.
An Alternate System - Ranked-Choice Voting
With a view of these shortcomings of FPTP, several countries have tried alternate voting systems. Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) is one of them that is suitable for the Indian context. In RCV, voters don’t vote for just one candidate, but can rank multiple candidates according to their preference. The result is counted not just based on the first preference, but their other choices can also play a role in the decision process. Voters are allowed to rank their preference ordinally as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so forth (typically up to 5 ranked preferences). While counting the votes, a candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins the election outright. If no candidate is the first choice of more than half of the voters, then all votes cast for the candidate with the lowest first choices are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on who is ranked next on each ballot. If this does not result in any candidate receiving a majority, further rounds of redistribution occurs. In each round of counting, one candidate gets eliminated and votes are redistributed till a single candidate with more than 50% vote emerges.
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