Where the fish has no name

When discussing the median voter theorem with my public policy class, I went on an informative and educational tangent about ranked choice voting.

We gave an example in which we would go out to eat, each pay our own way, but we must all go to the same restaurant in town. We went through the multiple rounds of voting, eliminating least popular alternatives, and came to a conclusion. The winning restaurant was Tropical Smoothie. If you are not familiar, it is nothing to write home about. However, it is also inoffensive and they provide what they say that they will.

The students quite enjoyed the exercise and the process drove the point home that there are perfectly reasonable alternatives to the typical one – man – one – vote status quo.

Entirely separate

Last weekend, my family purchased a new beta fish. There are six people in our family with four children, ages ranging from one to six years old. Thanks to an offhand comment by my wife, I realized that it was such a beautiful opportunity to teach the kids about ranked choice voting. Everybody in the family suggested a name for the fish. The options were: Hibiscus, Jack Sparrow, Bubbles the 2nd <3, sparkels, camouflage, and ‘no’. Which do you prefer?

I had the great wisdom, to avoid fights and arguing, to make most people pretty happy, and to institute ranked choice voting among my family electorate. We made ballots and everything.

As is typical, not everybody voted who was qualified to vote. We only had a turnout of 66%. Then, I proceeded to ask the kids, which name was their first favorite, second favorite, third favorite, etc.

Following the ranked choice voting algorithm, ‘camouflage’ won the plurality. It had all of the trademarks of a peaceful transition to a new name for our fish. However, almost immediately, screaming, crying, and feelings of betrayal ensued.

Kid #2 (the people pleaser) was upset that ‘sparkel’ didn’t win. However, she had not even ranked it as her first favorite. She learned the hard way that ranked choice voting does not reward strategic votes. Kid #3 felt gypped because her suggested name had won, but also seemed to not win, given that kid #2 was throwing a fit. Kid #1 was upset because the other two children were upset, calling into question the legitimacy of the election.

In the end, I collected the ballots, destroyed them, and announced that “I don’t know what the name of the fish is, and that it is now time to eat dinner”. I was in full ’retreat, reorient, and distract mode’.

My wife says that the lesson is that ranked choice voting won’t work if adults are like children. That’s not my take away. My take away is that elections don’t work if the rules are endogenous to the results. If there is the threat of violence, subversion, or shenanigans then we will all know that the rules are not real in the first place and that the entire election is a sham.

My students showed me that ranked choice voting has all the benefits that I intuited. My children showed me that democracy isn’t worth a darn thing without respect for the rule of law.

Btw, this is the fish who still hasn’t a name: