The winner-take-all system we currently use in our elections forces voters to simply pick one candidate. This way of voting often forces voters to select candidates based on that candidate’s electability, and not because it is who they really want in office. It also makes it so voters don’t often do a lot of research into many of the candidates, and vote based on popularity or name recognition versus on positions that candidates have taken. A solution to the winner-take-all system is ranked choice voting (RCV).

Why do I, a senior at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, know that RCV will improve elections? This past summer, I attended a political science camp in Washington, D.C., where I learned about different voting systems that are being utilized in the United States. One system I learned about was, as you may have guessed, RCV, and how it works.

In RCV, voters are allowed to rank the candidates based on their personal preference. If after the votes are counted, no candidate has over 50% of the votes, the candidate with the least amount of votes is eliminated from the election, and anyone who voted for the eliminated candidate has their votes transferred to their second choice. This process repeats until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.

New York City recently used RCV for its mayoral election, and they created a ballot where voters could select up to five candidates, ranking them 1 through 5. Voters were allowed to vote for a minimum of one candidate and a maximum of five. They then followed the usual method of RCV, where they counted the votes, and if no candidate had over 50% of the votes based on the voter’s first choices, they eliminated the losing candidate and transferred the votes of anyone who voted for the eliminated candidate to their second choice.

Since this first mayoral election, New York saw the benefits of RCV, and decided to implement RCV for primary and special elections.

Some of the benefits that the New York City Civic Engagement Commission have reported are that “campaigns are more likely to focus on appealing to voters like you and less on attacking each other,” and that “cities that have implemented Ranked Choice Voting have elected more women and more women of color, making their elected officials more representative of their communities.”

The idea of making elected officials more representative of the communities that elected them is especially important in Hawaii. Hawaii’s voter turnout has decreased by 54% since Hawaii first gained statehood, and data shows that the communities that have the lowest voter turnout are Native Hawaiian communities. In 2020 the Office of Hawaiian Affairs surveyed just over 2,000 Native Hawaiians, and found that 50% of the people they surveyed were not even aware of Hawaii’s implementation of an all-mail-in-voting process.

A plausible reason that Native Hawaiian communities are not voting is because they don’t feel like they can vote for anyone who is really going to represent them, so there is no point in voting. Implementing RCV has proven to allow for elected officials to be more representative of their districts, making RCV a realistic solution to Hawaii’s low voter turnout problem, especially within the Native Hawaiian community.

Ultimately, it is clear that Hawaii struggles to incentivize people to vote, and that change must be made in Hawaii’s voting culture. A simple solution to this problem is RCV. RCV will make people able to legitimately use their voice, and to elect someone who they truly believe will represent them.

I am going to be eligible to vote in the 2022 elections, and I would love to see Hawaii adopt RCV, so that I can vote in a way that truly represents my beliefs. That is why I support RCV, and you should, too.

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Hawaii Senate Bill 2162, relating to ranked choice voting, advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Similar bills have made it to conference committee twice before: SB 560 last year, and SB 427 in 2019.

Briana Harmon, a senior at Hawaii Preparatory Academy on Hawaii island, is interested in voting modernization because she wants people’s votes to better represent their beliefs.