Portland’s ranked-choice debut causes voter engagement to crater; 1 in 5 who cast ballots chose no one for City Council
Portland’s ranked-choice debut causes voter engagement to crater; 1 in 5 who cast ballots chose no one for City Council
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21917446
Ballot in question:
Mayor:
District 1:
Jesus Christ people are fucking stupid... How hard is this to understand??
Rhetorical question of course. The country is very stupid. Just today my coworker said "see Trump is our next president and the taxes already went down!" (he was referring to the interest rate decrease from the federal reserve...)
I have no idea what party these people belong to. It's not listed on the sheet. Their policy positions aren't shown. Their endorsements aren't shown. Nobody knows who the fuck any of these people are.
What you need Ranked Choice Voting for is Congress and the Presidency. Local elections also need to be partisan. Otherwise how the fuck do you know where any of the candidates even generally stand on the issues?
Local candidates usually have websites, do interviews with local papers, and are suuuper excited to talk to potential voters, so people could look at any of that?
We do all of our voting by mail and get a pamphlet with most of the serious candidates. It is really great and we have like two weeks to work on it. It isn't like we showed up at the poll and were confronted with this and had to fill it out on the spot.
We should also make vote by mail mandatory.
The city or county will probably have a thing called a website where you can read about all of those things for each candidate.
Is the website in the voting booth?
Local elections also need to be partisan. Otherwise how the fuck do you know where any of the candidates even generally stand on the issues?
I'd rather parties have no official role so we're actually voting for people to represent us. Candidates have a responsibility to get their message out, and voters have a responsibility to do some research.
But that just doesn’t happen. We have to plan for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, researching candidates is great and all, but like they didn't exactly set themselves up for success with this ballot design.
It kinda sucks ass. :/
Non partisan elections.
I prefer having ballots not say what party the person is in. Then people actually have to know who they are voting for, not just blindly check a box beside R or D every time.
... You do research, you have a fucking week minimum after you receive your ballot. This isn't complicated. Parties also have nothing to do with an individual representatives politics.
It's not super hard to understand the concept, but the visual display of this implementation is objectively horrifying. No line or column delineation, just a grid of bubbles. I literally look at Excel sheets for a living and this makes my head hurt trying to keep track of what bubble is going where, I don't blame voters for giving up on it.
Yeah that’s odd. How could it be better though and still be paper? Limit you to two votes?
In Australia, which has Ranked Choice Voting, you number the candidates from 1 to the max candidates. For Senate races, you can vote for the party, letting the party decide the down ballot representatives. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work
I believe in this process, the ballots are human counted, but the country has less than the population of California, so it probably doesn't take too long. Scaling it up for the backwards US system would be harder, but not impossible to improve.
It would be better to just give the voter a set of 6 lines, top to bottom, with rank 1 at top and rank 6 at bottom. That is the easiest to visualize and understand, and that's also how almost all of the campaign information about RCV has shown it... Then have some way to identify each candidate to put on each line that's not just hand writing the name. That I'm not 100% sure how to do. My engineer solution says create a lookup table with letters or numbers next to each candidate, but that could easily get confused with the rank in which to put them.
Here's an engineer's solution: raise the threshold for the number of signatures required to get on the ballot, and don't let someone sign a petition for more than one candidate for a given race.
don’t let someone sign a petition for more than one candidate for a given race.
This would be so much overhead work and also defeat the purpose of Ranked Choice Voting. This basically moves the First Past the Post earlier in the process, which will exclude candidates
It's less understanding/stupidity and more an issue with laziness/desire. I have no doubt that 99% of people who actually did vote selected their first rank choice and say eff it to the rest of the rankings. Too much effort and time to complete.
I think I'd still file that under stupid.
I really hope mail ballots become the norm. It was absolutely wonderful to be able to take the time to look people/propositions I didn't know up while I had the ballot there. That won't help with laziness though. Can't help lazy. :/
Just a note on mail ballots. Some can often abuse it by coercing their spouses to vote a particular way.
As somebody said in another comment, there were 19 candidates to choose from for mayor alone, and then 16-30 candidates for each district. That's up to 50 candidates to research to fill out a ballot, in combination with the poor formatting of these ballots. You've got 30 names with 6 bubbles next to every single one of them that you have to follow across to fill out your 6 choices. I've seen better formatted scantron test sheets.
If this had been the size of a normal primary election or something - around 3-6 candidates or something - I think people would've found it pretty easy to understand.
"Mission accomplished" 🛩️🪂🛳️
people voted for the guy that said he would stop future voting
that is where the USA is at