Portland’s first ranked-choice vote elects progressive outsider as mayor

Same thing happened here in the UK years ago. "Want to make out democracy better?" "Nah, mate."

Oregon voted it down because of the pages upon pages of ragebait in the voter's manual, that somebody with a lot of money paid to put there.

Our legislature passed RCV here in CA and our Dem governor vetoed it. Can't be electing progressives over more big money neoliberal Dems, gotta keep that voting power bloc intact

The UK did this about a decade ago by a 2-to-1 margin, on the same grounds. Commentators in Australia (which have had ranked choice voting for generations) quipped that this was final proof that Australians are smarter than Brits.

Was it too confusing or did someone spend a lot of money playing ads that kept saying it was too confusing I wonder. I'd actually love to hear what the local ads and media around that ballot measure were like if anyone is local to Oregon.

Maybe it's because I grew up in Illinois, but Missouri has been giving me whiplash over the last several years. I'd expect the kinda politics coming out of there from Florida, not a Midwestern state.

Its just corporations having it both ways:

When corporations benefit: Americans can read like 900 pages of fine print a minute and are all legal scholars.

When it doesn't benefit corps: Americans are cows, its offensive you're trying to make these morons fill out multiple choice papers, they might accidentally poke out an eye on the pens.

Reality: people have limits but RCV ballots are not too complicated. We see it all the time with roundabouts. When new roundabout is put in a few drivers take some time to adjust but eventually they figure it out.

The change is harder to deal with than the actual thing.

which is just another way to call the voters dumb, but maybe they're not wrong.

Given the outcome of the federal election, I'm increasingly convinced of that point.

I don’t know how it’s confusing.

Rank your top 5 favorite foods.

If you can do this, you can do ranked choice voting.

This article is literally why. Political outsider with popular policies won, do you know how much money a voting system that does this will cost the people writing those laws?

I wish I could say I'm surprised...

The new form of city government meant there was a significant number of candidates to parse through. And ranking several instead of picking just one favorite also added time. It took me several days to do my due diligence on all the measures and candidates when before I could usually get it all done in one.

Not complaining, though I could imagine people who don't take voting seriously easily getting impatient/overwhelmed.