Final four voting, ranked choice coming soon to Montana?

Chances are fair, some day soon you may be asked to sign an Open primaries, Final Four, Ranked Choice ballot initiative.

When my curiosity about electoral reform sent me to the Ranked Choice Voting Montana website a few days ago, I knew about the recent call for a top two open primary from former Governor Marc Racicot and former Secretary of State Bob Brown, but I didn't realize the full package of Montana electoral reform might be in play in the near future. Even the Ranked Choice Voting Montana homepage-entirely devoted to the benefits of that reform- didn't wise me up to the fact that somebody in Montana is campaigning for three major changes: replacing Montana's choose one party ballot primaries with a single ballot listing all candidates for an office; allowing up to four candidates to advance from primary to general election ballot; and asking voters to rank (first choice, second choice, third.) candidates in the general election.

It was only googling down the page from the Ranked Choice Voting entry that I stumbled on a League of Women Voters Zoom event where I learned that Ranked Choice Voters expect an answer by the end of March on their application to circulate a ballot initiative petition for all three reforms. If the state's attorney general says yes, proponents will get a chance to persuade 75,000 Montanans to endorse both an initiative for primary reform and one for ranked choice voting in the general election. That could be fun.

Seventy-five thousand is a lot of signatures to collect from the wilds of Montana, and while none of these reform ideas is new, the organized effort to sell Montanans on them is young. Montana's Ranked Choice chapter itself has only been around for a little more than a year. And, while it's not clear exactly when the group decided to push for final four open primaries, as of my visit, the homepage has not even caught up to that action.

The bigger challenge is likely to be that, while the idea of switching from Montana's present primary system, which gives allows a choice between voting in the Republican or the Democratic primary, to one that gives everybody one ballot with all choices sounds simple ( it helps when recognized Montana leaders like Racicot and Brown endorse it), and final four is just two more, ranked choice voting takes some explaining. That was evident when Helena Ranked Choice Voting volunteer Melinda Leas talked with about thirty people on that League of Women Voters Zoom call recently.

Most of the questions Leas got were about ranked choice voting. Okay, if I get a ranked choice ballot with four candidates for governor listed, I'm supposed to choose one as my first choice, another as my second choice, and so on. That's different from what most of us are used to doing, but really as easy as—one two three four. But then what happens? The tricky part is understanding exactly both when and what it is the vote counter does with all those second, third and fourth place votes.

The answer is “nothing” if one of the candidates gets more than half of the first place votes; in that case, the winner is in. However, as Leas explained, with striking examples from recent Montana senatorial and gubernatorial elections, a lot of times nobody does get more than half of the votes. With ranked choice voting, that means it's time for whoever is counting votes to take two new steps: eliminate whoever got the fewest first place votes, and reassign the second place votes for that candidate appropriately. “Appropriately” means I don't know exactly how to explain it.

Even equipped with all the kinds of visual aids and charts I don't know how to make, and talking with the committed voters of the League , Leas ended up explaining that reassignment more than once. The trick is that the vote counter, which will usually mean the computer, recognizes that, while you and I both picked that loser Al as our first choice, you marked Betty as second choice, while I picked Cindy. So now Betty gets another first place vote (yours), and Cindy gets mine. The elimination and vote reassignment rounds continue until somebody has a majority of first place votes.

Leas didn't get a lot of challenges to the notion that these electoral reforms, especially combined, could give voters more choices, eliminate anxieties about votes for a third party spoiler (since second choices count) and encourage voter participation. But those challenges will be coming, particularly from people who have found their way into office through the existing system. Tennessee's governor signed off on banning ranked choice voting last month; Florida's legislature and governor are on course to do likewise, and other state legislatures are sure to follow.

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Will Rawn is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor.