How we could get runoff results without runoffs

Last month, South Carolina held primary runoff elections for 13 state legislative seats and two solicitor seats because no candidate received at least 50 percent of the vote in the primary elections.

Runoffs uphold majority rule — which is good — but they come at a cost: Voter turnout declines, candidates need to raise money quickly to compete in a second election, and taxpayers are on the hook for paying for that second election. Only 9 percent of registered voters participated in this year’s runoffs, down 5 percentage points from the primary and even more from the presidential primaries in February.

This turnout drop was particularly large in some races. The House District 81 Republican runoff, where winner Bart Blackwell won by just 1.6 percentage points, saw a 36 percent decline in participation from the primary. In the Democratic runoff in House District 79, turnout plummeted 56 percent, meaning fewer than half of primary voters returned for the election that decided the winner.

The good news is that there is an easy solution to the declines in participation and the expense of the runoffs, and it’s already used by some of South Carolina’s voters: ranked ballots.

South Carolina uses “instant runoff” ranked ballots for military and overseas voters in federal and state primary elections, so that sending and receiving a second ballot for runoff elections isn’t necessary. These voters return two ballots before the primary. On the first ballot, they select one candidate to receive their vote in the primary. On the second ballot, they rank candidates in order of preference so that if the primary election requires a runoff, their runoff vote goes to whichever remaining candidate is ranked highest.

Ranked ballots have worked well in South Carolina, and they’re also used for overseas voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. In 2013, S.C. Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire called them “an unqualified success,” because 92.5 percent of military and overseas voters in South Carolina’s June 2012 primary also participated in their runoff election by completing ranked ballots.

That consistently high rate of participation from the primary to the runoff is in sharp contrast to the consistent drop in turnout among in-person voters. In the 13 federal primary runoffs South Carolina conducted from 1994 to 2014, voter participation dropped an average of 20.1 percent from the primary and the runoff. Nationally, the average turnout decline in 184 federal primary runoffs was even higher, at 35.2 percent.

The success of ranked ballots for a select few begs the question: Why not use ranked choice voting for all primary voters?

Cities across the country are doing just that. Cities with a total of population of approximately 2.4 million in California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland and Minnesota now use ranked-choice voting as an alternative to runoffs. In addition, voters have approved its implementation in cities in Florida, Michigan, New Mexico and Tennessee.

Ranked-choice voting allows voters to rank as many candidates as they want in order of choice on one ballot. All first choices are counted, and any candidates who get a majority win just like in any other election. But if nobody has a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and people who voted for that candidate have their second choice instantly counted. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority and is declared the winner.

Research shows that it does more than save money: In 2013 and 2014, political scientists Todd Donovan and Caroline Tolbert worked with the Rutgers-Eagleton poll to survey more than 4,800 voters in seven cities using the system and 14 “control” cities that don’t use it. A strong majority of voters in ranked-choice voting cities supported keeping the system, and voters in those cities generally found the campaigns more civil and satisfying.

By adopting ranked-choice voting, South Carolinians would still get the consensus results that runoffs are meant to provide but without the low turnout and high costs associated with holding a second election. S.C. lawmakers should expand their innovative use of ranked ballots and capture their benefits for all primary voters.

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 6:00 PM.