@George-K said in Victory Warnock:
NRO: The case against run-off elections
Two states, Georgia and Louisiana, use what political scientists call a two-round system in general elections. Under the system, if no candidate receives over half the votes cast in the first round, the election proceeds to a second round in which only the top two candidates from the first round are on the ballot. Proponents of this system extol its majoritarian virtues, highlighting the way it ensures that the victor’s win is legitimated by the support of an absolute majority of voters.
Why did only Georgia and Louisiana adopt this system? Well, given these two states’ segregationist past, it should come as a surprise to no one that this originally was done to dilute the black vote, by requiring the winning candidate to receive a majority in a multi-candidate race in a place where African Americans are a minority of the voters. Of course, an institution’s racist origins aren’t necessarily an indictment of its modern-day legitimacy if it no longer exists to disenfranchise black people. But history aside, the two-round system is bad on the merits.
For starters, the absolute majority that the runoff system yields is artificial. Ranked-choice-voting systems produce a victor with an absolute majority that reflects the entirety of the candidate field in much less time and at a lower cost. That’s not to say that ranked-choice is perfect. It has its fair share of problems, but it’s superior to the two-round system.
The runoff system also carries its own set of assumptions. Why is a candidate’s election through a runoff inherently more legitimate than a win through plurality-voting systems such as first-past-the-post? A candidate who beats out all the other candidates in a field is worthy of elected office, irrespective of whether he made it past an arbitrary threshold. Proponents of runoffs have failed to explain why 50 percent is the magic number that engenders legitimacy. Who’s to say it’s not 66 percent, 75 percent, or 100 percent, for that matter?
And perhaps most dubiously, supporters of runoff systems rest on the assumption that elected officials must always be the choice of a majority of voters. Why is that the case? This mobocratic approach to politics is precisely what Edmund Burke and the Framers of the Constitution rejected. Majority support isn’t the only path to political legitimacy. Nothing improper occurs if a candidate gets elected through a simple plurality. This is just democracy at work.
First-past-the-post is easier for a politically unengaged electorate to understand and can be processed more seamlessly than preferential-voting systems, good qualities to have at a time when the counting of ballots has become politicized. Republicans control Georgia’s state government and have already made other positive changes to the electoral system. Why not ditch this racist rel
They're incorrect. Blacks represent a large percentage of Louisiana voters. They can, and do, swing elections by bloc voting. Their political power is not diluted.
