10/22/2020
Why should you consider ranked choice voting (RCV)? If you think our current voting is working fine, read this FOX news story from Fall River, MA. The short version is that faced with Federal indictments for tax fraud and stealing from investors the city’s mayor, Mayor Correia refused to step down so the Council held an election with two questions on the ballot. Q1: Should the mayor be recalled? Q2 If recalled which of five candidates should replace him? Oddly enough Correia was one of the five names to replace him. Roughly two-thirds of the voters voted to recall so he was recalled. The 1/3 who voted not to recall him then voted vote for him. Because the other 2/3rds split their votes among the other 4 candidates the mayor was re-elected with a 1/3 plurality even though 2/3rds opposed him. This sort of thing happens quite often in regularly scheduled elections and voters just assume that a plurality winner would beat every one of his opponents with a majority in head-to-head matchups and there’s no way to prove them wrong. In this case we can see Correia would likely lose to every one of them. With RCV as weaker candidates are eliminated their vote transfers to voters’ second and third etc. choices until
someone gets a majority. For more on ranked choice voting try Amazon’s free preview of my ebook “Finding Our True Political Center - Through the Coming Revolution in Voting.”
