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106 Nat'l Civic Rev. 25 (2017)
Candidate Civility and Voter Engagement in Seven Cities with Ranked Choice Voting

handle is hein.journals/natmnr106 and id is 25 raw text is: liv Eng y and Vot even Citi wit Ranked Chie Vo 4i a aked choice voting (RCV) election, voters rank candidates in order of preference. The tally of RCV votes simulates a series of instant runoffs. In each runoff, the last-place candidate is defeated and ballots cast for that candidate are added to the tally of the next-ranked candidate on each ballot. The runoffs continue until a winner emerges. This pro- cess means that RCV rewards candidates who can win second and third choices from a broad range of voters in addition to first choices from a large core of supporters. In theory, RCV incentivizes campaign civility because, in order to win second- and third-choice rankings, a candidate needs to appeal to other can- didates' supporters. The increasing use of RCV in the United States, including in four Bay Area cit- ies in California and Minnesota's Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, enables rigorous test- ing of the effects of RCV on the civility of election campaigns. As part of a broader project funded by the Democ- racy Fund, the Eagleton Poll at Rutgers University has partnered with the University of Iowa's Caro- line Tolbert and Western Washington University's Todd Donovan in conducting two polls-one in 2013 and another in 2014-that explore the impact of RCV on city elections in the United States. Each poll surveyed a random sample of more than 2,400 likely voters, the great majority of whom had voted in their local election that year. (Likely voters are defined as currently registered voters who, when asked, expressed interest in local affairs.) The sur- veys were conducted in English and Spanish and on cell and landline telephones. In November 2013, half of respondents surveyed by the Eagleton Poll were in three cities holding RCV elections: Minneapolis, where RCV was used for mayor and 21 other offices; St. Paul, where RCV A Publication of the National Civic League lb BY SARAH JOHN AND ANDREW DOUGLAS was used for mayor and a city council race; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the multiseat form of RCV was used to elect the city council and school committee. The other half of respondents were from one of seven non-RCV control cities with similar demographics, including Seattle, Tulsa, Boston. In November 2014, the Eagleton Poll conducted an expanded version of the same survey in eleven Cali- fornian cities: the four Bay Area cities that use RCV (Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Lean- dro) and seven control cities. In the 2014 survey, 1,345 respondents were likely voters in one of four cities holding elections with RCV: 685 respondents from Oakland, which used RCV to elect a new mayor and half of its city council and school board; 395 respondents from San Leandro, which used RCV to elect a new mayor and three city councilors in citywide races; 151 respondents from San Fran- cisco, which adopted RCV first in the Bay Area and in 2014 used RCV in one competitive city council election and five less competitive elections in its eleven wards; and 114 respondents from Berkeley, where there were two competitive RCV city council races among its eight wards. The 2014 survey also included 1,111 likely voters in one of seven control cities in California with demographics and social structures comparable to a surveyed RCV city. Summary of Findings The data provide evidence of RCV's positive effect on civility, widespread general support for RCV, and voters' ease with voting on a RCV bal- lot. Here is a summary of the key trends and find- ings of the 2013 and 2014 surveys. In addition, data is presented from a survey by Tolbert and Donovan of more than 200 candidates from cities holding RCV elections in 2011 to 2013 and from control cities. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) National Civic Review DOI: 10.1002/ncr.21307 Spring 2017 25

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