Ranked choice voting faces cloudy future after election setbacks
Ranked choice voting faces cloudy future after election setbacks
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"And though it lost in Oregon, she pointed out that the measure had majority support in jurisdictions that currently use ranked choice voting, such as Multnomah (home to Portland) and Benton counties."
Problem: In Portland, yes, a majority of voters did vote for the state wide ranked choice ballot measure... but 20% of voters completely SKIPPED the ranked choice races for Mayor and City Council.
They had an option of ranking their top 6 choices and did not choose any.
That seems like a indictment of the candidates, not RCV.
No single election outcome should be used as counter-argument to RCV as a whole.
This is why approval voting is my preference: easy to vote, easy to count, and still works if ths voter doesn’t know a thing about it and just marks one candidate
You could still mark one candidate in Portland's RCV.
If they genuinely don’t have a preference, is it a bad thing if they refrain from effectively voting at random?
For one person? No. For 1/5th of the voting population? It's a travesty.
Especially in the city council race...
These are photos of my ballot, I live in District 1. District 1 has NEVER had representation on the city council before.
This is why we voted to change the system of government, the city now has 4 districts, each district gets 3 councilmen.
Voters had a chance to rank their top 6 choices to elect 3 people per district and 20% of voters went "Nah!"
My city (Oakland) has ranked-choice voting for mayor and city council, and (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t have a similar issue with under-voting.
Was there another factor besides the number of candidates on the ballot (e.g., no candidate statements in voter guides, or an ad campaign against ranked voting)?
Could be a combination of first time with ranked choice and too many candidates. Somebody is going to earn a degree doing the analysis here.
It's almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn't present voters with a lot of choice.
If it’s really just a matter of too many candidates, could they increase the number of signatures needed to get on the ballot?
It was less the number of signatures and more that this is the very first election for a new system of government, it drew out a TON of people.
Previously, we had a mayor and 5 city councilmen. Each elected city wide in a typical first past the post election.
Now we have a mayor elected citywide in a ranked choice, choose 6 election, who hires a city manager to run the different bureaus.
Then the city is split into 4 districts, each electing 3 councilmen in a rank 6 ballot.
So the city council is going from 5 to 12 and each district is guaranteed representation where often not only was it not guaranteed, there WAS no representation.
All in all, between the mayor and the council seats, 119 people were running.
That’s too many positions to research for just one race. Five to six would probably be about the right amount of candidates for a single seat RCV.
I think [open] primaries still have a place to help weed out the field and narrow in on specific candidates.
Not every party has the money or resources to run a primary
These are all non-partisan races.
OK so then who should be running primaries?
In this case, the ranked choice voting is supposed to serve as an instant primary.
I guess you could run a 16 candidate primary and narrow it down to the top 6 for a rank 6 general election, but you'd still have the same problem, you'd just be adding a 2nd election.
Fortunately, the research wasn't that hard because it's super easy to eliminate the looney tunes candidates.
Ex. this guy:
Still, stunning how many first round votes he got...
p.s. "Michael Necula"? Mike Neck? Spot the vampire running for office!