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Marketplace All-in-One

What you need to know about ranked choice voting

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year alone, lawmakers in more than two dozen states have introduced or passed legislation in favor of ranked choice voting systems, where voters rank candidates in order of preference on their ballot.

Advocates sing the praises of ranked-choice elections, claiming it could be an antidote to the United States’ extreme political polarization. Others say switching to a new voting system would be too complicated for voters.

On the show today, Maresa Strano, deputy director of political reform at New America, unpacks ranked choice voting: what it does well, where it falls short, and what our voting systems have to do with the broader economy.

Then, a new strategy for wiping out medical debt is catching the attention of some local governments. And we’ll get into why mixed signals about the U.S. economy are complicating things for the Biden campaign.

Later, a listener shares how they learned the difficulty of farm work firsthand. Plus, this week’s answer to the Make Me Smart Question comes from sci-fi writer Andy Weir, author of “The Martian.”

Here’s everything we talked about today:

    We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. You can reach us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

    Transcript

    Click on a timestamp to play from that location

    0:00.0

    Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart

    0:10.6

    as all of us.

    0:11.6

    I'm Kyle Rizzo, thanks for joining us. Everybody, it is Tuesday, it's the 12th day of September

    0:16.4

    on the agenda today, something called Ranked Choice Voting. Some of you are probably

    0:21.0

    familiar with it. Others of you, including myself, not so much, really. But it's a different

    0:25.6

    way of voting than a lot of people are used to. Voters, as the name suggests, rank the

    0:29.5

    candidates in their order of preference. More than two dozen states have introduced

    0:33.0

    your past legislation in favor of that kind of voting in their states, and obviously

    0:38.1

    gaining popularity.

    0:39.1

    Yes, and you know political conversations like this warm, my little nerdy heart. However,

    0:46.2

    if you're wondering what this has to do with economics, well, here's the thing. The field

    0:50.3

    of economics is ultimately the study of choice and how we make choices, and therefore rank

    0:55.5

    choice voting is basically about increasing choices for the voters. It's a stretch, but

    1:00.2

    work with me here. Anyway, tear to tell us more about all of this is Marissa Strano. She's

    1:05.4

    the deputy director of political reform at New America, which is a public policy think tank.

    1:11.8

    Welcome to the show.

    1:12.8

    Hi, thank you so much for having me.

    1:16.9

    So for Kai and others who maybe don't love to delve deep into the wonkiness, what is

    1:23.3

    rank choice voting and how does it work?

    1:27.3

    So you already gave a great intro. It is a preferential ballot system, and that sort of stands

    1:32.9

    in contrast to what most of us in the United States are used to, which is that you see a

    1:38.3

    ballot, you're asked to pick one candidate, boom, done. In this case, with rank choice,

    ...

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