On this episode of Ballots & Bagels, ASD Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine speaks with Constance Hargrove, director of elections for Pima County, Arizona. Arizona recently became the first battleground state to nominate election deniers for all three top statewide offices. They discussed Arizona’s August 2nd primary and how to successfully conduct elections amid an onslaught of mis- and disinformation from candidates and others.
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What is ranked-choice voting anyway?
Sep 11, 2024
Landry is the facilitator of the League of Women Voters of Colorado’s Alternative Voting Methods Task Force. An earlier version of this article was published in the LWV of Boulder County’s June 2023 Voter newsletter.
The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.
However, many people, including RCV advocates, are unaware that it is actually an umbrella term, and ranked-choice voting in fact exists in multiple forms. Some people refer to any alternative voting method as RCV — even approval voting and STAR Voting, which don’t rank candidates! This article only discusses voting methods that do rank candidates.
Why should we learn about different voting methods?
If you are in the market for a new house or car, you don’t usually buy the first house you visit or the first car you test drive; rather, you shop around. Similarly, the League of Women Voters of Colorado would like activists to consider different voting methods before advocating for a particular method in a particular situation.
Plurality voting is the simplest and most familiar of voting methods. Also known as “first past the post” voting, it works well if a ballot lists only two candidates for a given position.
If our goal is better representative democracy, however, we should strive to adopt voting methods that allow voters to express their preferences more effectively, that encourage more candidates to run and that reduce the so-called spoiler effect, by which a less-popular candidate wins when the spoiler candidate draws sufficient votes away from a popular but similar candidate.
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How are ranked-voting methods similar and different?
A voting method has at least two components:
- Ballot format, with directions to voters for casting a valid ballot.
- Tabulation method, of interest to election administrators, candidates, and voters.
In a December 2022 Fair Vote Canada video, professor Dennis Pilon named a third component: district magnitude, or the number of seats to be filled in a ballot contest. We take this component into account by distinguishing between single-winner and multi-winner contests.
Ballot formats for a variety of ranked-voting methods contain the same basic directions: “Rank candidates in order of preference.” In practice, the directions amount to “Fill in at most one bubble per column and one bubble per row.” Voters should always fill in at least a first choice. Below is the ranked ballot that was used in the August 2022 Alaska special election.
The tabulation method is what differentiates the various ranked-voting methods.
First, consider what is unique to RCV tabulation methods, i.e., what defines RCV: All forms of RCV allow for rounds of counting in which the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and votes for that candidate are transferred to the next-highest-ranked candidate on the ballot.
Within this RCV constraint, tabulation methods can differ widely. The table below lists seven different RCV tabulation methods. (Note that yet another method called RCV in
a New Hampshire bill would have allowed voters to give the same ranking, such as the top spot, to multiple candidates, but it did not pass in the 2018 legislative session.)
Unfortunately, the media and activists often conflate single-winner and multi-winner versions of RCV — claiming, for instance, that RCV leads to proportional representation when that statement is true for only some of the multi-winner forms of RCV.
Forms of RCV Key: SW= single winner, MW = multiple winners | |||
Voting Method | SW or MW? | How It Works | Where It’s Used Some jurisdictions currently or planning to use this form of RCV |
Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) -What most people think of as “RCV” video[Video correction: Only a 1st-round winner is guaranteed a majority of all votes] | SW | If no candidate gets a majority of votes in the first round of counting, then the lowest vote-getters are eliminated round-by-round and their votes transferred to the next available ranking on the ballot until 1 candidate has more votes than the remaining candidates combined. | San Francisco, Santa Fe, Maine, New York City and more than a dozen other places; Boulder in 2023 for its first mayoral election |
Top-4 Plurality primary with an IRV general election, similar to Final-Five Voting | (MW then) SW | All candidates run against each other in a Plurality “choose-one” primary election. The top 4 candidates proceed to an IRV general election. Unlike regular IRV, this version does not eliminate a second election. | Alaska since August 2022 |
Contingent Vote (3 or more rankings) or Supplementary Vote (only 2 rankings) | SW | All but the top 2 vote-getters are eliminated in the first round of counting. Votes for eliminated candidates are transferred to the highest ranked of the 2 remaining candidates on each ballot. | NC Court of Appeals 2010; London, UK; Overseas voters in AR, AL, GA, LA, MS and SC mark a regular primary ballot and a ranked ballot that counts if there is a top-2 runoff |
Single Transferable Vote (STV),
aka
Proportional RCV (pRCV) [ a “gold standard” proportional voting method to elect people] | MW | Candidates who receive the threshold of votes are elected. Any surplus votes are transferred to the next highest available ranking. Lowest vote-getters are eliminated round-by-round and their votes transferred to the next available ranking on each ballot until all seats are filled. | Cambridge, MA since 1941; Albany, CA as of 2022; some members of two boards in Minneapolis; Portland, OR starting in 2024; Boulder, CO 1917-1947; Australia Senate; Ireland lower house |
Bottoms-Up 15% Threshold RCV [ determine proportional allocations] | MW | Conduct IRV tabulation rounds but don’t stop until all remaining candidates have at least 15% support, whereupon candidates’ delegates are proportionally allocated. | 2020 Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas and Wyoming Democratic presidential primaries to allocate delegates to the national nominating convention |
Bottoms-Up Top-2 RCV primary with a “choose-one” general election | MW (then SW) | Conduct IRV tabulation rounds until 2 candidates remain. Voters vote again in a runoff election to decide which of the 2 primary winners gets the seat. | Seattle starting in 2027 |
Preferential Block Voting (PBV),
aka
Sequential RCV [ NOT proportional; a plurality of voters may elect all the winners] | MW | The first seat is filled using an IRV tabulation. Then all ballots are tabulated again using IRV but ignoring the winning candidate. The process is repeated until all seats are filled. (In the video some voters help elect 3 candidates, while voters who ranked Yellow #1 don’t help elect any.) | Utah municipalities may opt into an IRV and PBV pilot project through the 2025 elections. In 2022 Portland, ME voters approved changing from PBV to proportional STV. |
Now we’ll consider some non-RCV ranked-voting methods. The first four methods listed have all mistakenly been called RCV in Colorado in the past few years!
Forms of Non-RCV Ranked Voting (includes only single-winner voting methods) | |||
Voting Method | How It Works | Where It’s Used | |
Insurance Ranking [The ballot’s vote is solely dependent on candidate eligibility, not on the tabulation process.] | If the ballot’s 1st-choice candidate dies, withdraws or is disqualified after the voter has returned their ballot but before Election Day, the vote counts for the next ranking. | 2023 Colorado Senate Bill 301 would have allowed military and overseas voters to use this for the 2024 presidential primary election (but the bill died in committee). | |
Borda Count | Assigns the largest point value to a voter’s 1st choice, 2nd largest to the voter’s 2nd choice, and so on. The candidate with the largest point total wins. | In some overseas political elections and in various organizations and institutions – see Survey Monkey’s Ranking ballot | |
Bucklin Voting, aka Grand Junction System | If no candidate gets a majority of 1st-choice rankings, then 2nd-choice rankings are added to the total. If still no candidate gets a majority, then 3rd-choice rankings are added in. | In more than 60 US cities in the early 20th century, including Denver, Grand Junction, Colorado Springs, San Francisco, Cleveland, Newark, and St Petersburg | |
Count the Rankings [ arguably more a presentation of raw data than a tabulation method] | Voters must rank all candidates. Count and report the number of 1stchoices, the number of 2ndchoices, and so on for each candidate. | In organizations using Microsoft 365’s Ranking form | |
Condorcet Method [actually, a family of voting methods, including Ranked Robin, Minimax, and Schulze} | The candidate that defeats all the opponents in pairwise matchups is the Condorcet winner. If no Condorcet winner exists, each method has a rule to determine a winner. | Mostly by organizations and political parties overseas, as well as high-tech organizations, such as IEEE. A few overseas municipalities use Schulze. | |
Coombs’ Rule [ The video contrasts IRV and Coombs’ Rule.] | If no candidate gets a majority on the 1st round, then the candidate with the most last-place votes is eliminated. The process is repeated until one candidate wins. | A variant is used on the “Survivor” reality TV program |
Now what?
So, how do you now approach conversations about voting methods? To cover all bases, consider following the example of the Colorado secretary of state and Colorado statutes: don’t use the term “RCV,” but rather the super-umbrella term “ranked voting.” And, if someone mentions RCV or ranked voting, here’s a good first question to ensure that everyone is on the same page: “Which form of RCV or ranked voting are you talking about?”
Who knew there were so many forms of ranked voting? Well, now
you know.
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N.H. citizens assembly offers plan to improve confidence in elections and governance
Sep 10, 2024
Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
The recent work of the New Hampshire Together citizens assembly offers a model for how we can restore faith in our democratic institutions and improve civic engagement through nonpartisan deliberation and actionable reforms.
The citizens assembly, which convened in Manchester in June, brought together 50 New Hampshire residents representing a cross-section of the state’s demographics and political ideologies. Their goal was ambitious: to explore ways to rebuild trust in elections, reduce partisan polarization and increase the responsiveness of the political system to the will of the people.
Over three days of discussion and debate, the participants achieved something that has become increasingly rare in today’s political landscape — they found common ground. By the end of the event, supermajorities supported four key recommendations.
Redistricting: A fairer process
The proposal to emerge from the assembly with the highest level of support (89 percent) was the creation of an independent redistricting commission. By ensuring that district lines are drawn by a nonpartisan body rather than political incumbents, New Hampshire could take a significant step toward restoring fairness in its elections. The commission would work to ensure these districts would be compact, avoiding irregular shapes and keeping communities intact.
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Voter education: Informed citizens, informed decisions
The second recommendation focuses on improving voter education, supported by 87 percent of the assembly participants. The proposal calls for creating a nonpartisan working group to collaborate with the New Hampshire secretary of state's office to increase voter awareness about election laws, policies and procedures.
This includes better publicizing election integrity measures, enhancing town websites, disseminating educational materials and making election data (e.g., audits and voter registration statistics) easily accessible. The goal is to foster transparency and trust in the electoral process.
Primary reform: A single ballot for a less polarized election
A recommendation that garnered 85 percent support was the introduction of a “single ballot” primary. In this system, all properly registered candidates would be listed on one ballot, with the option for candidates to include their party affiliation if they choose. This reform is intended to open up the primary process, making it more inclusive by eliminating the requirement for voters to declare a party affiliation in order to participate.
This new system would be accompanied by a comprehensive voter education campaign.
Civics education: Building the next generation of engaged citizens
The final recommendation was to establish a Civics Education Advisory Board to improve civics education for students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. The 83 percent support for this recommendation highlights the broad recognition that reinvigorating civics education is essential for fostering engaged and informed future voters.
A comprehensive civics curriculum would teach students not just the mechanics of government, but also their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The curriculum would cover practical skills such as how to register to vote, participate in elections, lobby for issues and engage in civic representation. The assembly emphasized the need for an interdisciplinary approach, where civics education is integrated across subjects and evaluated using proficiency standards similar to those applied in English, math and science.
Next steps
The New Hampshire Together citizens assembly’s work is far from over. Its delegates, along with a bipartisan group of legislators, are now tasked with turning these recommendations into actionable legislation for the 2024-25 session of the New Hampshire General Court. This next phase will be critical, as the success of this initiative will depend not only on the quality of the recommendations but also on the ability of lawmakers to enact meaningful change.
“We’re so very proud and humbled by the work our participants accomplished over the past year and especially over three intense days,” said New Hampshire Together Project Director Martha Madsen. “The people of New Hampshire selected the topics and found common ground on policies to address shared concerns. This was a heartening, hopeful experience.”
The topics discussed at the citizens assembly were familiar to New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, who spoke to the participants on June 23. Scanlan has already begun a broad-based voter education program for a range of Granite Staters, from school kids through veterans, seniors and minority groups, all to improve understanding of, and confidence in, New Hampshire’s voting process.
“Elections work best when they accommodate everybody,” Scanlan said. “As long as we can meet the needs of all the constituencies of an election, as equally as possible, we maintain confidence in that process.”
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‘Black voters are not a monolith’
Sep 10, 2024
Meyers is executive editor of The Fulcrum.
Released two months before Election Day, a new study of Black voters and non-voters has identified five “Black values clusters” that can help organizations improve community outreach and engagement as they prepare for Nov. 5.
By identifying characteristics shared by different groups of Black people, the study’s researchers believe they can better understand why some are — or are not — civically engaged, and they intend to build programs based on the research to improve connections and help more people understand the power of their votes.
“We conducted this research because, historically, the Black electorate has been treated as a monolith in part because the only measures used to assess our interest were vote choice and party ID,” said Sojourn Strategies CEO Katrina Gamble, whose firm conducted the research along with HIT Strategies. “However, as organizers working in a community day in and day out, and as recent shifts in the political landscape indicate, there are important differences within the Black community that inform how people think about and engage with democracy.”
Ranada Robinson, research director for the New George Project, summed up the study: “Black voters are not a monolith and this research proves that. And that’s key for how we implement the findings.”
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The study was commissioned by New Georgia Project, Detroit Action Education Fund and POWER Interfaith (a Pennsylvania organization), each of which is implementing programs designed to engage various cohorts, leaning into lessons learned from the research.
For example, POWER Interfaith is recruiting members of civically engaged clusters to host events where they can reach out to those who are disconnected from politics and civic life.
“We are using the Black values research to reach a subset of 50,000 eligible Black voters who are not yet civically engaged,” said Gregory Edwards, the group’s interim executive editor. He noted that they can build on shared faith values when other connections, besides race, are lacking.
Robinson explained that her group can reach out to “underrepresented and underestimated high-opportunity voters” — a term she prefers to “low-propensity voters” — by having a better understanding of differences among cohorts of Black people and how to engage with them.
“Elections, including this one in November, are not the endgame. They are opportunities to engage Black folks, listen to them and activate them to get, or stay, civically engaged as a tool toward building a multiracial and more inclusive democracy,” she said.
Similarly, Detroit Action has planned programming designed to connect across segments of the Black community. And he, like the others, believes even the less engaged cohorts can be motivated to vote if properly motivated.”
“In Detroit, we’re going to prove that cynicism doesn't have to be a barrier to engaging in the civic process,” said Branden Snyder, senior advisor for Detroit Action Education Fund. “You can be a cynic and still vote if it means being able to deliver change for a community that you love and that you represent.”
The research, which included a survey of 2,034 Black registered voters and 918 Black unregistered voters asked standard questions related to issue priorities and demographics but also asked more probing questions.
“[Community organizers] understand to engage and build power in the Black community they have to better understand who they are talking to beyond basic demographics like gender and age, and instead dig deep to understand how values, identity and political agency impact how different parts of the Black community think about elections and democracy,” said Gamble.
The largest group identified by the study is the “Legacy Civil Rights” cluster, which accounts for 41 percent of respondents. The oldest of the cohorts, this group has a strong Black identity and generally identifies as Democrats.
“The vote and democracy is incredibly important to them because they see it as something fought and won by our ancestors. It is a civic duty to them. They are going to vote and they know who they are going to vote for,” said Gamble.
Racism and discrimination is the top election issue for that group.
The “Secular Progressives” (12 percent of respondents), also have strong Black and Democratic identities, and they also are likely to vote. This group is younger — largely Gen X and millennials — and is the most educated of the cohorts.
“They believe laws and policies often keep the Black community down. However, despite that skepticism, they are motivated to vote to protect their community from harm,” said Gamble.
Their top issue in this election is health care.
“Nextgen Traditionalists” make up 18 percent of respondents. Primarily millennials and Gen Z, they share the same strong Black identity but are more politically independent, though still leaning toward the Democrats.
“Despite their potential to be more regular voters they are likely missed in the typical industry focus on likely voters,” said Gamble.
This group’s top issue is also health care.
The “Rightfully Cynical” make up nearly a quarter of respondents (22 percent.) Mostly men and members of Gen Z, this group disapproves of both parties and generally has low social trust.
“They have a low perception of the power of the vote,” said Gamble, and therefore are the least likely to cast ballots. Their top issues are inflation and the cost of living.
“Race-Neutral Conservatives” are the smallest group (7 percent). Mostly men, they are mainly Gen X and millennials. They don’t emphasize their Black identity and lean toward Republicans, unlike the other clusters. This group has the highest incomes among the segments.
“They are more likely to blame barriers that the Black community faces on individual choices,” said Gamble.
Like the Rightfully Cynical, their top issues are inflation and cost of living.
It is clear from the research data that Black voters are not a monolith and spending more time to better understand their needs is critical to increasing the numbers of Black people who cast ballots.
As stated by Gamble, “Where the political industry has invested millions of dollars to understand White voters like Joe the Plumber and soccer moms, we believe the Black electorate requires that same level of understanding and investment.”
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Imagining constitutions
Sep 10, 2024
Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
America’s Constitution is always under the microscope, but something different is happening of late: The document’s sanctity is being questioned.
In the pages of The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai recently asked whether the Constitution is “dangerous.” Erwin Chemerinsky similarly wonders whether the Constitution is actually a threat to the United States. Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn question whether the “broken” Constitution should even be reclaimed. These questions would scarcely be uttered a generation ago. Today, they’re typical.
As disturbing as alarm over America’s holy charter may be, what is exciting is the way in which critics are responding. Constitutional skeptics have begun to take matters into their own hands and have offered their own versions of a 21st century charter. Leading writers and legal scholars were recently asked to imagine the next constitutional amendment. Before that, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas gathered a bunch of academics to draft a more progressive Constitution for our times, while the National Constitution Center did the same thing with separate teams of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Hashtags for imaginary draft constitutions are trending.
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Those interesting and laudable efforts are the very definition of creativity. Fictional Framers are being asked to create new constitutions for the 21st century, ones that respond to the hyper-polarization of the moment. The drafters of these invented texts are no doubt influenced by the Trump presidency, the “woke” culture, political tribalism, the pandemic, regional distinctions, and on and on. Unsurprisingly, the progressive drafters emphasize rights, while the conservatives focus on the side of federalism and state power. The libertarians, in contrast, try to reduce government’s imprint while championing individual freedom. In the end, the dialogue is both fascinating and enlightening.
It is also distinctly American.
The United States should be proud of its tradition as a constitutional innovator. Political entrepreneurs were born alongside the new nation. John Dickinson, the primary author of the Articles of Confederation, was a dreamer. So was James Madison, and James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton, and all their colleagues who huddled under a hot Philadelphia sun in 1787 to craft a fresh legal charter. Similarly, state constitutional drafters number in the thousands. State leaders have assembled more than 160 times in American history to rewrite their fundamental documents.
These individuals shared an admirable audaciousness. What they also shared was a fervent commitment to see the constitution-making project through. Each was able to translate their vision for a “more perfect union” into an actual, tangible and eventually ratified constitution. They were critics of the political order they saw outside their windows, and they did something about it.
There are similar constitutional dreamers among us today. Hundreds of them. And yet there is little appetite to take their promising ideas and turn them into a new Constitution. The question is why. I would point to at least six different reasons.
- The fear of a runaway convention: There is concern that every clause, safeguard and protection in the Constitution would be fair game for revision.
- The polarization of America: There is concern that liberals and conservatives could never agree on any reforms to the Constitution.
- The challenge of representation: How do we decide who should be at the drafting convention and who should not?
- America is not really in crisis: Constitutions are generally born out of crises (civil wars, coups, economic disasters, etc.). We are experiencing political malaise right now, but not a genuine crisis.
- The sacred Constitution: For millions of Americans, the Constitution is still sacred. Flawed? Sure. But not irredeemable.
There are more reasons, of course. But these are the main sticking points, and they appear to be intractable. Calls for a constitutional convention — a return to Philadelphia of sorts — pop up fairly often. We should welcome them. Conversation about political improvement begets further conversation. Indeed, it is a demonstration of the strength of our constitutional republic that Americans are encouraged to interrogate the nation’s first principles.
Attempts to rewrite the Constitution are inevitably speculative — hypothetical, academic, abstract — mostly because few believe we’ll soon invoke an Article V constitutional convention. That should not diminish the importance of these imaginary efforts, however, or of the more conventional creative approaches to thinking about our current political and social problems. The U.S. Constitution is the most innovative political invention in the post-Enlightenment age. The way we talk about it should be equally creative.
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‘A healthy democracy requires social trust’: A conversation with Ilana Redstone
Sep 10, 2024
Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the eighth in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."
Ilana Redstone has launched a personal campaign against certainty. A professor of sociology at the University of Illinois and a former co-director of the Mill Institute, Redstone believes certainty is the accelerant that has helped to fuel the culture wars and political polarization in the United States.
“The power of certainty is easy to underestimate,” she writes. “And when it comes to both aspiring and established democracies, that underestimation can be downright dangerous. Certainty makes it possible to kill in the name of righteousness, to tear down in the name of virtue, and to demonize and dismiss people who simply disagree.”
In recent years, Redstone has sought to advance the idea of nuanced thinking and principled disagreement by becoming a prominent public intellectual, publishing frequently in mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post and in intellectual journals like Quilette and Persuasion. She is a vocal critic of the lack of viewpoint diversity in the media and higher education.
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I spoke with Redstone about the decline in social trust in the United States, the importance of trying to understand your political opponents and the tension between advancing free speech and protecting vulnerable groups. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Berman: How did you get here? Why have you chosen to spend so much of your time thinking about the challenges of communicating across ideological divides?
Ilana Redstone: I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ‘90 in Togo. I think it's probably safe to say, for most people, that being in the Peace Corps raises questions of moral and ethical complexity. It forced me to ask myself, “Am I propping up a corrupt government? Am I fostering a dependency mentality?” So I have always been interested in moral and ethical complexity and in political discourse.
I got a joint degree in demography and sociology from Penn. And for a long time, my work focused on immigration in a very dry, narrow, academic sense. I was a quantitative researcher. I analyzed data and wrote academic papers that nobody really read. I didn't have a public-facing side to my work at all.
But seven to eight years ago, I started noticing that there were a lot of conversations, both on my own campus and in other places, around issues of race, identity, ethnicity, gender, etc. To be honest, I felt like everybody had received a memo that I just didn't get. It felt like all kinds of assumptions were being made that no one ever said out loud — assumptions about the causes of inequality or assumptions about how we think about identity or whatever. And so over time, I just started paying more and more attention to these assumptions and found they related back to my interest in moral and ethical complexity.
GB: Talk to me a little about your decision to become public-facing. Do you think of yourself as a culture warrior? What's your relationship to the culture wars?
IR: I really hope that nobody thinks of me as a culture warrior. I don't feel that way at all. Most of the time, I don't think I’m in the business of changing people’s minds about anything. I don't care what your position on abortion or affirmative action or whatever is. I just don't care. But I do care if you can have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you.
I don't like smugness or snarkiness. And I think those are the kinds of things that in the culture war space get you a lot of attention. I've never been interested in talking with people who want to scream about wokeness. I try to be very careful and precise and thoughtful in my work. I can't control what people will do with my work. But I try to model a spirit of questioning and curiosity about the world. I take that pretty seriously.
GB: You have a book coming out called “The Certainty Trap.” What is the certainty trap?
IR: Concerns about free speech, self-censorship, lack of viewpoint diversity, academic freedom, civil discourse … all of these things to me are downstream consequences of a fundamental problem in how we think. The problem is certainty and the contempt with which we view people who disagree with us. In order to be morally outraged, you have to be certain of something. There has to be some value, principle or belief that you're holding onto.
Avoiding the certainty trap means really making an intellectual commitment to the idea that there are no ideas, principles, beliefs or claims that are exempt from questioning, criticism or challenge. Nothing. Nothing gets a free pass. It also means that there are no ideas that are off the table. Nothing. There is nothing that is off the table. And so you want to talk about why you think the Holocaust didn't happen? Okay, let's do it. Let's dig in.
GB: After the violence in Christchurch, New Zealand, you wrote a piece saying that celebrating viewpoint diversity doesn't mean that we have to tolerate extremist hate.
IR: I haven't gone back and read that piece, so I don't know whether I would word it a little bit differently today, but I still stand by it. I believe all lives have equal moral value. Period. That's a bedrock principle for me. When that principle is violated, when someone shoots a bunch of people, it isn’t hard to call that out.
GB: But isn’t part of the problem that what constitutes extremist hate turns out to be in the eye of the beholder? Aren’t there trade-offs between promoting free speech and combating hate?
IR: We can't have a world where there is a diversity of viewpoints, pluralism and communication across differences, and also have a world where nobody gets offended or upset by what somebody says. At the end of the day, you have to pick one. Because there is always going to be a tension between the two. What I say to students is: If what you're trying to do is to make sure that no member of any marginalized group ever feels offended, or that their existence is never challenged, that’s fine, but just know that you can't also have a culture of free expression. You just can't.
GB: As we move toward the culmination of the presidential election, are you worried about the potential for political violence?
IR: Of course I worry about it. A lot of the way that the 2024 election is being framed, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that this election is about protecting democracy, that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters are an existential threat to democracy. I understand the thinking behind that. I get it. It's trying to make people aware that the stakes are really high. At the same time, I do think there's an argument to be made that one of the biggest threats to democracy is calling the other side an existential threat to democracy.
I think that there's a distinction to be made between Trump and the people who would vote for him. I don’t think we should assume that because they support Trump that they don't care about democracy. Any time we make assumptions about our opponent's intent, it's bad news. At the end of the day, when all the dust settles, when the inauguration is done in 2025, we all have to live together.
Human beings have two ways to resolve conflict: words and violence. Part of what a healthy democracy requires is social trust. Because you're not going to get what you want all of the time. In a democracy, sometimes the other side wins. We can disagree vehemently about abortion, gun control, immigration policy, whatever, but we need to be able to live with that disagreement.
It's not just the job of the people who disagree with me to prove to me that they're trustworthy. It's also partly my job to come up with, as best I can, a version of their argument that makes sense to me and that is not rooted in hate, resentment, stupidity, or ignorance.
I try to teach this to my students. I’m in the sociology department. Most of my students, not all, but most, tend to be very progressive. In class a couple of weeks ago, we spent a lot of time talking about J.K. Rowling's tweets that some people thought were transphobic. I asked my students to come up with a story about J.K. Rowling's tweets where they were not rooted in hate, resentment or ignorance. I didn’t ask them to believe it. I just asked them to come up with a plausible story. Once you do that, you have to acknowledge that there is a version of the world where somebody can hold that view and not be coming from a place of hate. We can’t be certain about our adversary’s motives. That’s something that we can all learn to do. If we care about reducing political polarization, strengthening democracy, etc., it is a skill we can all learn to develop.
GB: What do you mean when you use the expression “political polarization”? I find that the phrase means different things to different people.
IR: I do think it is important to try to be precise. What I mean by it specifically is how we view one another. Do I believe that the people who disagree with me are hateful, stupid, immoral, etc.? That's what I mean by political polarization.
GB: Thankfully, at this point, the actual incidence of political violence in this country is still pretty minimal. But it does feel to me like we have an increase in threats of violence, which I think can warp our public discourse. I'm wondering how you would characterize the state of the intellectual climate at the moment.
IR: I think it's a mess. I think one of the things that we've seen since Oct. 7, particularly within higher education, is a complete inability to navigate the conflict in the Middle East. I think it has been a spectacular own goal. Everybody was totally unprepared for this conflict, which is the mother lode of controversial topics. In my view, we did this to ourselves, which is really frustrating. Because nobody wants to touch this problem.
GB: What do you mean when you say “this problem”? What's the problem?
IR: The problem of how we communicate with one another. The problem of certainty. To go back to something that I said earlier, there's going to always be a tension between wanting to not offend people and wanting to make space for a diversity of viewpoints.
GB: It seems like Oct. 7, or more accurately, the reaction to Oct. 7, revealed a schism on the left in this country. A lot of my Jewish friends in particular were really surprised by the unwillingness to condemn Hamas in some quarters. I'm wondering whether Oct. 7 has had any impact on your thinking?
IR: For me, with Oct. 7, I was horrified, in the same way that I think most serious people were. But I wouldn't say that the reaction surprised me. In some ways, maybe, it surprised me that it surprised people. These are the rules of the game. This is how we set it up. It's all about identity. Since Oct. 7, I've done workshops with Palestinian and Israeli students who will both say that they feel like they're being silenced. How did we get here? How is that a good place to be?
GB: In Tablet a few years ago, you wrote that many DEI training programs are based on a dangerous combination of “coercive measures and misplaced confidence in our knowledge.” Has anything changed in the way you think about DEI programs since you wrote that piece?
IR: It's not that I think diversity is bad. I like diversity. But what I would say about DEI programming is that there are certain assumptions underneath it. One is about identity — that we can, and should, think about who we are primarily along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc., and that we can lean into these identities basically as much as we want and there's no downside. I think that's a debatable assumption, but we never even bother having that conversation.
In “The Certainty Trap” I wr,ite about the fallacy of equal knowledge. This is the idea that if only you knew what I knew, we would agree. And so I'm just going to give you information, and then we'll be on the same page. It doesn't work that way because people vary along all of these other dimensions, including moral values and the way that they interpret their experiences and find meaning in their lives.
DEI training and anti-racism training often fall into this trap. I actually think there are ways to take the best of what DEI training is trying to do and leave the ideological stuff behind.
GB: Not long ago, you wrote a piece for The Hill that expressed some skepticism about the idea of bringing partisans together for conversation across their differences. So if that's not the answer, what is? How do we get out of the certainty trap?
IR: The whole idea of we’re going to take a red person and a blue person and put them in the same room ... I don't mean to throw shade on that. I think it's important work. I think it has value. My concerns with it are twofold, really. One is scalability. In a country of 330 million people, I don't know how many dyads and focus groups you can convene. There's a scalability question.
If I'm blue and you're red, and we sit together and we have a conversation, and, at the end of that conversation, you're like, "Oh, she's not such a snowflake." And I'm like, "Oh, he's not such a racist." That’s obviously a good thing, but it's not totally clear to me whether that then generalizes to the next red person that I meet. Maybe it does, but it's not immediately obvious to me that it does.
So the question of what to do ... first of all, I would just say there's no easy solution. We got ourselves into this mess. There's no magic wand to solve it. But I think we need to change the way we think about education. We have to get people to understand that if you care about the health of our political discourse, you can't then say the conversation is over when someone feels offended. You can't hang an argument on an assumption about someone else's intent. You have to be precise in your thinking.
GB: How successful do you think you've been with imparting these ideas to your Gen Z students?
IR: My experience in general is that they are very open. Whatever degree of success I have had is because I'm not trying to convince them of anything. I'm not making political arguments. The goal is not agreement. The goal is to figure out how to live with disagreement.
This article originally appeared on HFG.org and has been republished with permission.
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