This is the Cato Deli Podcast for Wednesday, August 4th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

After a confusing rollout of ranked choice voting in New York's mayors raise,

how does the case for it stand up now?

Adam Kissel, a senior fellow at the Cardinal

Institute, argues that there are real upsides

to rank choice voting that, balanced against the New York

experience, continue to hold promise.

Rank choice voting gives voters a chance to vote not just for their top candidate,

but to rank their second, maybe their third, maybe their fourth top-ranked

candidate, and if your first choice vote doesn't have enough votes to win and nobody has enough votes to win,

then the lowest vote getter is removed. Anybody who had voted for that lowest vote gutter now gets their second best choice.

And then you continue that through different rounds until you have one winner in a single winner situation who finally has more than 50% of the vote.

And what changes about elections when you do that? What do we know from experience? We don't have a huge amount of experience, but we have

enough to know that you reduce the cost of elections because you reduce the need for a runoff, you get an instant runoff.

That's something that happens every time if otherwise you would have had a runoff.

Two, you can have voters vote their conscience so instead of trying to game it and saying well

the candidate I really want has no chance so I'm not even going to put that person's name down. I can now put

that person's name down and I can put down is my second choice, the one who is my second,

my real second choice. So you get better revelation of voter preferences and then it's more

speculative we don't really know but people think that there's more civility in elections because if you're going

after somebody's second-choice vote then you need to be friendly to that candidate, to that person's first choice of candidate

...