Portland’s first ranked-choice vote elects progressive outsider as mayor
As US electorate moves to right, Oregon city bucks trend and also elects most diverse city council in history
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Meanwhile, the state initiative to pass RCV crashed and burned. :(
Missouri just voted to ban RCV!
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?
Because money not spent/earned is money not lost.
I wish I could say I'm surprised...
Probably because it was incomplete for reasons unknown. I'm not sure why, but we get really bad ballot measures. 118 was super terrible, and 117 was seemingly unfinished.
Interestingly, we had extremely low turnout in the local elections. Apparently RCV, or the sheer number of candidates (over 100 for 12 positions), or a combination of both contributed to very low turnout. There were more people voting for POTUS than any of the local candidates, which is a little disappointing. I'll dig into the numbers this weekend.
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.
Indeed. If that had not been paying attention over the last couple of years and saw both sides of that second ballot, it would be super overwhelming. Thankfully I did my research ahead of time and knew how to vote before opening the ballot envelope. I still didn't drop it off until a day or two before, though. After that article about the drop box fires, I figured it was a good idea to wait until mid day near election day.
This is a solved problem in Australia. You put the parties next to the candidates names to assist where people don't want to learn about the individual candidates in their location, and people hand out "how to vote" cards at the polling places for how their party prefers the others parties.
People who don't have their own opinion on anything but their first choice use that as a cheat sheet.
There are solutions for the lazy and disengaged.