Elizabeth Warren leads Joe Biden in a hierarchical survey

Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead the overcrowded Democratic group – but according to a "hierarchical choice" system designed to eliminate the overwhelming preference of the majority, Senator Elizabeth Warren would overtake Biden, from 53% to 47% , according to a new poll provided exclusively in advance to Vox.

The national online survey of real Democratic voters was conducted by YouGov and sponsored by FairVote, an advocacy-independent advocacy group that supports electoral reform. Unlike a regular poll, he asked respondents to rank several candidates in order of preference, in order to simulate the hierarchical choice vote, a system currently used in Maine and other locations. (FairVote defends the system and hopes it will be adopted elsewhere in the United States.)

The way in which the hierarchical vote is run is that candidates with fewer votes are eliminated, and then their votes are redistributed to the person each elector has designated as their next choice. For example, an elector could rank Senator Bernie Sanders as the first choice and Warren as a second choice, which means that if Sanders were eliminated, that vote would be transferred to Warren.

YouGov has tested the Ranked Choice Methodology offering the remaining 20 Democrat Candidates Optionally (with the possibility of ranking 10 of them) – and also by proposing only the top five current candidates (Biden, Warren, Sanders, Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend). , Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg) as options. As the final results are quite similar for both versions, this article will focus on the five-candidate version for simplicity. (More detailed results for both versions are available on the FairVote website.)

In an initial count counting only the top ranked voters, Biden leads the Democratic group with 33%, followed by Warren with 29%, Sanders with 20%, Harris with 10% and Buttigieg with 8%, according to the poll. .

But it turns out that respondents who initially favored Sanders and Harris prefer Warren to Biden, according to a ratio of about two to one. So, once the battlefield is reduced to a head-to-head confrontation between Biden and Warren only, and the votes of the eliminated candidates are those of each of the highest ranking voters, Warren leads Biden by 6. points.

The results are an interesting indication of how a result can change with a different counting system. But they could also indicate something bigger.

Although voters can theoretically choose from many candidates, there are only a few months left from the day primary voters will vote. Thus, the way voters rank their options in a smaller field could tell us a lot about what the race might look like in the future, and what could happen was the field to win more. These results, at least, suggest that Warren would benefit more than Biden.

Browse results by choice

For the uninitiated, a hierarchical choice vote (sometimes called an "instant vote after a poll" or "indirect vote") may seem like a confused and complicated system. We asked our respondents to rank Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren – first, second, third, fourth and fifth. (If they did not vote at all for some of these candidates, they could also rate it). The graph below shows the total points.

Christina Animashaun / Vox

A quick note here: The actual voters' figures are rounded from a weighted sample – they are presented here to help simulate the running of the count in a real election, based on the results of this poll.

What this means

Christina Animashaun / Vox

If the results of this poll were the results of a typical US election, Biden would simply win – he would have got the highest number of first choice votes in that first count. But it only has a little over a third of the votes on five candidates.

Now, if it was a typical Democratic presidential primary election, it would not be so simple. This is because, rather than declaring a winner, Democrats assign delegates proportionally to all candidates who get 15% of the votes for each primary or caucus. These delegates will vote at the convention.

Ranked-choice can inform a system like that too. You can cut the account once there are only candidates who have 15% or more votes – to make sure no votes are "wasted" for candidates who have not reached the required threshold. In our example above, things would end in the third count (showing Biden with 39%, Warren with 38% and Sanders with 23%).

However, during meetings of the Rules and Regulations Committee this summer, several members expressed skepticism as to whether the hierarchical choice vote could or should be included in the main competition, given the rules in effect. party. And Maine, the state that has adopted the system the most, will only use it in next year's general election rather than in the presidential primary.

In general, the goal of the ranking by choice is to ensure that the winner is at least somehow the choice of the majority of the electorate – and that voters who vote for other candidates that the main candidates will not see their votes rejected. .

Imagine an election with only three candidates. Candidate A gets 35% of the votes, candidate B 33% and candidate C 32%. In the most popular American voting system (the first-past-the-post system), candidate A would simply win. But 65% of voters did not vote for him. In fact, they might well despise him and wanted to make him lose, but were divided between the other two options.

The ranking by choice would avoid this result: candidate C would be eliminated and his supporters would be redistributed to their next choice. Another advantage is that, in cases of hierarchical choice, voters are free to choose an unconventional candidate or outsider as their first choice, without fearing that their vote will be "cast".

Of course, there are also criticisms of the vote by choice. Simon Waxman argued that, in practice, the system can be confusing and exhausting – and that the support of the promised majority does not always happen because voters do not rank enough candidates. (In this YouGov survey, 85% of respondents ranked the five candidates – but of course that also means that 15% did not.)

Others argue for alternative systems designed to find a "Condorcet winner", that is anyone who would like to win a race to the head against all other candidates. (It is at least possible for such a candidate to have little support of choice and be quickly eliminated from the under-choice.)

Whatever you think of the most appropriate voting system, you can go to the FairVote website for a deeper analysis of the data in this survey: they have interactive charts for the five-candidate result presented in this article, as well as a separate outcome in which the 20 candidates were offered as options.