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Common Dreams reports
Election reform advocates on [April 18] praised a decision by Maine's Supreme Court, upholding the use of ranked-choice voting for the state's upcoming primary elections, saying the ruling demonstrated that the court heeded the demands of Maine voters.
[...]Unlike in traditional voting, in which the candidate with the largest share of votes wins--even if he or she is far from capturing a majority of the support--in ranked choice voting, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If no candidate has a majority after the first count, the least-popular contender is eliminated, voters' ballots are added to the totals of their second-ranked candidates, and the ballots are recounted. The eliminations and recounts continue until one candidate has a majority.
Supporters of the system say it increases voter turnout and proportional representation.
Maine's June 12 multi-party primary elections, in which voters will choose candidates for governor and congressional districts, will now make history as the first state election to use ranked-choice voting.
Fifty-two percent of Maine voters supported the system in a November 2016 ballot initiative, but lawmakers passed a bill last year delaying its implementation until December 2021 and argued that the state could not use a new voting system without direction from the legislature. The state Senate also threatened to repeal ranked-choice voting altogether if it could not pass a constitutional amendment by then.
More than 77,000 Maine residents signed a petition saying any repeal of the system by the legislature should be voided.
"The Maine legislature has changed or repealed all four of the initiatives passed by Maine voters in 2016", said Kyle Bailey of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in a statement on Tuesday. "Today's decision by the Maine Supreme Court confirms that the Maine people are sovereign and have the final say."
The Portland Press Herald, Maine's largest circulation daily newspaper, has extensive background details in their April 17th story: Ranked-choice voting will be used for June primaries, Maine supreme court rules.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Entropy on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:35AM (1 child)
This is very important. The two party system is beyond broken, and we need to utilize voting systems that allow votes for 3rd(or 5th) party candidates while still allowing those votes to vote into more popular candidates in most elections. I'm not saying this system does that(it really doesn't), however it does offer a step forward from our currently used system.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:36PM
Yes, IRV, Condorcet, etc. are much better voting systems than plurality wins. But they do come with an problem that must be addressed in order for large scale use to be optimal:
When you have multiple valid choices and you can rank them in order, you need to evaluate a lot more information to do a good job of voting.
I don't know how best to address this, but it *is* a real problem. (Even without fixing this problem though, it's a huge improvement.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.