We’ve started focusing our argument for a better way of voting on local elections — giving cities and towns the option of trying out ranked-choice voting — because South Carolina legislators tend to be more willing to experiment with ideas that don’t affect them personally.
But perhaps we’ve been thinking too small. In a guest column on our pages Tuesday, the former chairmen of two state Republican parties pitched the idea of using ranked choice, also known as instant-runoff voting, for South Carolina’s upcoming Republican presidential primary — as a way to help voters who like both of our home-state candidates.
And their pitch carried this powerful punch: Ranked-choice is what propelled Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s mansion in 2021, breaking that state’s decade-long blue streak.
We frankly don’t care who the governor of Virginia is, but the Youngkin example is important because we’ve had nearly two years of analysis about the lessons Republicans can learn from Virginia about how to appeal to Donald Trump’s base without turning off suburban (read: moderate) voters. Almost completely ignored has been the retooled primary Mr. Youngkin had to navigate in order to get to the general election.
But as former Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis and former Utah GOP Chairman Stan Lockhart argue, it was the party’s new primary rules that allowed a nominee to emerge from a seven-candidate field who could win the general election in the recently Democratic state.
Of course, this might not sound immediately attractive to the half of S.C. Republicans who support Mr. Trump. But if he maintains his majority support in the state GOP, using ranked choice wouldn’t change that. And to the half who don’t support him or realize he faces the lowest odds of any Republican of winning a general election campaign, it makes a lot of sense.
So too does the favorite son/daughter argument: In a traditional primary — even a primary that requires 50% plus one for a win, as South Carolina’s state primaries do but our presidential primaries don’t — a vote for Nikki Haley is a vote against Tim Scott, and vice versa. The beauty of ranked-choice is that a vote for one is not a vote against the other:
Ranked-choice voting allows every voter the option of ranking all the candidates in order of preference instead of simply voting for their top choice. Of course, no one has to vote for more than one candidate, but if they do, if their candidate finishes last and if no one gets 50% plus one vote, then their vote is re-allocated to their second choice in an instant runoff. The process continues until one candidate crosses the 50% threshold.
So come February, if you like Mr. Scott but prefer Ms. Haley, you could make her your first choice and Mr. Scott your second. If she finished ahead, your vote for her would hold in the instant runoff; if Mr. Scott finished ahead, your vote for her would be thrown out and replaced in the instant runoff by your second-choice vote for Mr. Scott. it works in reverse if Mr. Scott is your first choice. Either way, you don’t have to calculate which of your two favorite candidates is more likely to win and forsake the other one.
Our goal isn’t to produce more Republican wins — or more Democratic wins; it’s to produce more winning candidates. We like ranked choice because it encourages candidates, in order to court second-place votes, to be either more centrist or less nasty, or both — something we could use a lot more of in both major parties.
For the Republican legislators who will decide whether and when South Carolina expands access to the instant-runoff option — which they’ve offered military and overseas voters for years — it provides several benefits with no drawbacks. It allows S.C. voters the opportunity to support both Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, and it holds the prospect of boosting a presidential candidate who can pull off a Virginia repeat — winning the general election with an electorate that’s not naturally red.
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