Ranked-Choice Voting, Once Seen as a Novelty, Gains Ground Nationally | Fortune - Mike Hofman:
November 6, 2019 - "Voters in New York City have revised the city charter to adopt ranked-choice voting, a new way of deciding who has won an election that is steadily gaining in popularity across the country....
"Ranked-choice voting allows voters to select a favorite candidate, and then a second-favorite candidate, and so on. In New York City, the plan calls for allowing residents to rank their top five choices. If no candidate achieves a majority of the vote after the first round of counting, first-place votes for candidates at the bottom of the heap are set aside and those voters’ second-place votes are distributed among the top candidates, and so on, until a candidate achieves a majority....
"[T]he system reduces the need for arduous runoff elections, and ... it is particularly well-suited for municipal elections in which a diverse, multi-candidate field — often from within a single political party — results in a narrow win for a candidate with a strong base of support in, say, a particular neighborhood, but sometimes little appeal beyond that base....
“'First across the post' races also create weird, specific tensions with third-party options. On the one hand, a third-party candidate who has a passionate following nevertheless has a hard time breaking through because some group of voters will opt for a less dynamic but more 'electable' candidate — the lesser-of-two-evils approach to democracy that can feel so demoralizing. On the other hand, a third-party campaign can be used as a spoiler in a tight race, taking just enough votes away from a candidate whose views are broadly preferred by a slim majority of the electorate.
"In the close Kentucky governor’s race, for example, a third-party Libertarian Party candidate won 28,000 votes, about 23,000 votes more than the apparent, 5,000-vote margin of victory of Democrat Andy Beshear over Republican Matt Bevin. It’s impossible to know which alternative those Libertarian voters would have picked as a second choice, but it is well within the realm of possibility that they would have given Bevin the slim margin he needed to win a second term....
"New York City joins 20 other cities nationwide in adopting ranked-choice voting—many of them liberal bastions such as San Francisco, Berkley, and Oakland, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; and Cambridge, Mass.
"Maine is also a laboratory for ranked-choice voting, having implemented it by voter initiative in 2016 for federal elections. Last year, the state’s hotly-contested second congressional district provided a test case in ranked-choice voting outcomes. The incumbent Republican congressman, Bruce Poliquin ... filed a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of ranked-choice voting, ... asking the courts to order a do-over race. A federal judge who had been appointed to the bench by President Trump flatly rejected Poliquin’s argument and call for a new election."
Read more: https://fortune.com/2019/11/06/new-york-ranked-choice-voting-nyc/
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November 6, 2019 - "Voters in New York City have revised the city charter to adopt ranked-choice voting, a new way of deciding who has won an election that is steadily gaining in popularity across the country....
"Ranked-choice voting allows voters to select a favorite candidate, and then a second-favorite candidate, and so on. In New York City, the plan calls for allowing residents to rank their top five choices. If no candidate achieves a majority of the vote after the first round of counting, first-place votes for candidates at the bottom of the heap are set aside and those voters’ second-place votes are distributed among the top candidates, and so on, until a candidate achieves a majority....
"[T]he system reduces the need for arduous runoff elections, and ... it is particularly well-suited for municipal elections in which a diverse, multi-candidate field — often from within a single political party — results in a narrow win for a candidate with a strong base of support in, say, a particular neighborhood, but sometimes little appeal beyond that base....
“'First across the post' races also create weird, specific tensions with third-party options. On the one hand, a third-party candidate who has a passionate following nevertheless has a hard time breaking through because some group of voters will opt for a less dynamic but more 'electable' candidate — the lesser-of-two-evils approach to democracy that can feel so demoralizing. On the other hand, a third-party campaign can be used as a spoiler in a tight race, taking just enough votes away from a candidate whose views are broadly preferred by a slim majority of the electorate.
"In the close Kentucky governor’s race, for example, a third-party Libertarian Party candidate won 28,000 votes, about 23,000 votes more than the apparent, 5,000-vote margin of victory of Democrat Andy Beshear over Republican Matt Bevin. It’s impossible to know which alternative those Libertarian voters would have picked as a second choice, but it is well within the realm of possibility that they would have given Bevin the slim margin he needed to win a second term....
"New York City joins 20 other cities nationwide in adopting ranked-choice voting—many of them liberal bastions such as San Francisco, Berkley, and Oakland, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; and Cambridge, Mass.
"Maine is also a laboratory for ranked-choice voting, having implemented it by voter initiative in 2016 for federal elections. Last year, the state’s hotly-contested second congressional district provided a test case in ranked-choice voting outcomes. The incumbent Republican congressman, Bruce Poliquin ... filed a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of ranked-choice voting, ... asking the courts to order a do-over race. A federal judge who had been appointed to the bench by President Trump flatly rejected Poliquin’s argument and call for a new election."
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