YouTube showed me a better way to vote

It’s October 2016, and the halls of my middle school are flooded with students cheering and shouting. I’m floating among the lively crowd, not quite as rowdy as the rest, but with a smile on my face nevertheless. The results of our mock presidential election, in which the school had us all cast a vote for whom we would want as president, have just been announced over the public announcement system — Donald Trump won. 

My middle school was located in a small town in Michigan surrounded by farmland, which tends to yield a lot of Republican voters. Before I moved into town, I lived on that farmland, and my father, a working-class man and Trump supporter to this day, tried to instill those conservative values in me. And it worked, to an extent — I voted for Trump in that mock election. I was still a kid, only 11 years old, and I didn’t know any of his policies. I just knew that my dad liked him. But the summer after sixth grade, that all changed.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I loved watching brief informative videos on YouTube, made by channels like Vsauce and MinuteEarth. I constantly watched short videos about things like evolutionary biology, interesting geometric principles or mind-bending riddles in my free time. As the 2016 election consumed the internet, the algorithm eventually led me to CGP Grey and Vox.

Unlike the other channels, these two had tons of videos on government, politics, politicians and the inner workings of our country. Vox, in particular, is a left-leaning news site that happens to use explanatory journalism and takes advantage of YouTube in a manner that’s unique from other news sources. Grey, as his channel is run individually rather than by a group or organization, expressed more opinionated views in his videos than what I was used to.

I started watching videos from these channels on the American government in the middle of the night at my dad’s kitchen table. If I heard a noise from down the hall, where his bedroom was, I’d pause whatever I was watching and glue my eyes to the doorway, waiting to see if he heard. It felt like a terrible secret, sitting in the dark, quiet house with my Android tablet, learning that the things my dad had told me weren’t necessarily true. But I loved it. The videos were easy to consume, framed in ways that were infinitely interesting, and I was learning so much so quickly. And, although I formed my new political stances from the videos on specific candidates and policies, what mesmerized me the most were the videos on voting systems.

I fell down the rabbit hole of learning how our votes are actually cast. Grey’s channel has an entire playlist dedicated to voting, and I can promise you that I’ve watched every video on it at least twice. What I’ve learned is that this spiral of deepening party polarization and increased government standstills that American politics currently finds itself in isn’t just a result of societal issues or corrupt politicians — it’s also rooted in the basic rules of our elections.

In the current system, for most congressional elections and for the presidential election, the winner takes all. It’s simple: You vote for only one candidate, and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins the seat for their district, or the country or what have you. Of course, this is made more complicated by the Electoral College, but the concept generally holds true.

In the video “Why US elections only give you two choices,” Vox explains how our current election method forces us to choose between two parties. When a third-party candidate runs, they will realistically never garner enough support to beat either of the major popular parties. They can only make an impact as a “spoiler,” taking votes away from the candidate with the most similar views to the third party, which hurts their race and helps the candidate that has views dissimilar to that of the third. For example, people who vote for the Green Party, a left-wing third party, would likely otherwise vote for the Democratic Party. Thus, left-wing voters are split between the Green Party and the Democratic Party, lessening both groups’ chances of winning a majority; this ultimately helps the Republican Party. This is known as the spoiler effect, and it’s the reason why American voters feel as though they are limited to Democrat versus Republican and feel that they have to vote strategically rather than express what they actually want.

If the system was different, Americans wouldn’t have to vote for a candidate they don’t really like for fear of ending up with someone even worse. A method of voting that solves the spoiler effect is a ranked choice system, which is already used in several states’ congressional and local elections, as well as the University of Michigan’s own Central Student Government elections.

When voting through ranked-choice voting, specifically with instant-runoff voting, voters rank all available candidates from their favorite to least favorite, rather than picking one favorite candidate to bubble in. They can rank as many candidates as they want, and there is even an option to leave some blank if they don’t want to give their vote to those candidates. 

In the most basic sense of the process, when the votes are tallied, ballots whose number one choice had the smallest total number of votes aren’t just thrown out. Instead, those votes are transferred to the second choice listed. For example, returning to the Green Party, if a voter ranked a Green candidate as their first choice and a Democrat as their second, and once it was tallied, the Green candidate received the least total votes, that vote would be transferred over to the Democratic candidate. This system of eliminating the candidate with the least number of votes and transferring the votes to the next highest-ranked candidate on the ballot is repeated until one candidate wins more than 50% of the vote.

Grey explains this process in a much more entertaining and clear way using animals, pretty colors and pictures. So, I highly recommend watching his videos if you want a better understanding of ranked-choice voting methods, like instant-runoff voting, and, like me, enjoy having things explained to you like you’re 10. 

As Grey explains in beautifully simple terms, ranked-choice voting is wonderful, but it doesn’t solve everything. There’s still an ultimate result of the same parties always winning, with no representation for smaller parties that have a significant percentage of the public’s support. Additionally, ranked-choice voting results take much longer to be calculated and involve many more steps because of the multiple rounds of moving votes from candidate to candidate; this creates exponentially greater room for error and further decreases citizens’ trust in election results, in which Americans already have low confidence.

Honestly, when I first learned about this issue, I didn’t think a few extra rounds of calculations were a big deal, but it certainly can be. This past winter, the CSG election for president and vice president went through 562 rounds to reach a final winner. That’s 562 rounds of redistributing votes, recounting them, adding them up and identifying who should be eliminated next, in contrast to one definitive result in a winner-takes-all system. And that’s the result of an election with only 9,238 voters. Can you imagine how many redistributions it would take to reach the final result of the presidential election, with more than 100 million ballots to tally? As someone who worked the polls for the Michigan state primary in August and saw firsthand who protects your vote and how those votes are counted, I don’t think our current election infrastructure is capable of handling the kind of repeated precision that ranked choice requires.

Still, especially with modern tabulating technology and increased security in our elections, ranked-choice voting provides more genuine representation than the current system. At the very least, it opens doors to other, more representative forms of voting, especially in elections where multiple candidates can win.

One of these more representative forms, which Grey explains in a four-minute video featuring the animal kingdom, proportional representation is when, instead of each congressional seat being won by whoever got the most votes in their district, seats are awarded in alignment with how much of the popular vote each party received. So, if the Green Party won 5% of the vote, they would win 5% of the seats available in the legislature. There are many different ways to go about this, but in the end, the governing body is as close as possible to being fully representative of the people.

Proportional representation decreases the influence of gerrymandering, prevents minority rule and, most importantly, increases political diversity. Having more than two groups in Congress with varied political values opens countless doors for cooperation when it comes to passing new legislation because you don’t need the approval of a particular group to have a majority, unlike now, where progress generally means winning over members from the other side.

These concepts of varied voting systems are relatively simple ways to move our democracy one step closer to what it claims to be — for the people. These alternate forms of voting are gaining traction, but they need support to become widespread. I believe that there would be more push for their implementation if people just knew more about them. America can do so much better in regards to our electoral processes; I know this because I learned so when I was in seventh grade, sitting at my dad’s kitchen table at 2 a.m. in front of a glowing screen. 

Looking back at all of this content, it’s honestly shocking to me how much information lies in the recesses of these YouTube channels — videos that have been online for more than a decade, that lay out confusing information in a way that’s easily consumable and genuinely useful, interesting and relevant. It’s like a life hack for gaining knowledge. Of course, I take everything I learn online with a grain of salt, but I attribute so much of what I know now to these dinky five-minute videos full of cute graphics and little drawings with charming voice overs. 

In the digital age, information isn’t only easier to access, but also easier to understand, because resources like Grey and Vox’s channels take on the role of condensing daunting subjects. It’s not as difficult as you might think to become informed, and in this particular aspect of our government, the fix is relatively simple and so beneficial. So go, learn something new, become an expert on a problem you never even knew existed — it’s your civic duty, and it’s fun!

Statement Columnist Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu.

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