SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ranked-choice voting adopted in New York City, along with other ballot measures
New York City will move to a system of ranked-choice voting, shaking up the way its elections are run after voters approved a ballot question to make the change.
The city will be by far the biggest place in the U.S. to put the new way of voting to the test, tripling the number of people around the country who use it.
A ballot question proposing the shift for New York primaries and special elections was approved Tuesday by a margin of nearly 3-1. It's now set to be in effect for New York's elections for mayor, City Council and other offices in 2021.
Under the system, voters will rank up to five candidates in order of preference, instead of casting a ballot for just one. If no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the last place candidate is eliminated and their votes are parceled out to the voter's second choice, a computerized process that continues until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner.
Ranked-choice voting is now in use or approved in 18 other cities around the country, including San Francisco, Minneapolis and Cambridge. The state of Maine also uses it. Backers say the system discourages negative campaigning, and forces candidates to reach out to more voters rather than relying on a narrow base. It's also designed to allow voters to pick their true favorite, without worrying about throwing away a vote on someone who can't win.
Previously: Maine Supreme Court Approves Ranked-Choice Voting for 2018 Elections
Maine Debuts Ranked-Choice Voting
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:27PM (1 child)
This is a weird misconception that somehow stays alive. The electoral college was a compromise designed to satisfy all the various interests that were significant at the time. Some of them, like how much representation should be given to slaves, are obviously no longer relevant. Others, like protecting the interests of sparsely populated states from being trampled by densely populated states, are still very significant.
None of these reasons have to do with practical problems of getting votes to the capital for counting or getting voters to polling places, although it has turned out to sometimes protect against vote counting problems. In 1960, Kennedy defeated Nixon with a narrow popular vote margin, but a comfortable electoral margin. If you think the vote counting debacle in 2000 was bad, imagine it happening nationwide.
It is true that the Electoral College does not really work the way it was originally intended to. The Founders did not expect the two-party system (despite designing a political system that not only allowed but guaranteed it - but I speak with the benefit of two centuries of hindsight), and none of their decisions were made with it in mind. The original concept was that presidential electors would be similar to representatives in Congress, except that their only function would be to deliberate and then vote for the President. Acceptable systems had been devised to manage representation in Congress, so a similar, parallel system was devised to select the President as well. This is no more "patrician belief in an aristocracy" than the Congress itself is, and most of the Founders hated anything that had even the faintest whiff of nobility and feudalism. (For many years America's navy had commodores instead of admirals, because of the connection [wikipedia.org] the admiralty of the Royal Navy had to the Royal Family).
Alexander Hamilton, who was one of the people most responsible for the design of the Electoral College, hated the "winner take all" system of selecting electors currently used in most states and introduced a constitutional amendment to mandate electors being chosen by district, as is done in Nebraska and Maine, but he died before he could gain sufficient support for it. This system would certainly be better as it would eliminate "swing states" and the general problem where virtually everyone that doesn't live in Florida, Ohio, or a few other places is effectively disenfranchised. But it wouldn't be perfect, as gerrymandered districts would now affect the Presidency as well as the Congress.
Something that many people don't realize is that, a few decades ago, support for Electoral College reform was widespread, but today, overall support has generally dropped and is now roughly split evenly. To some degree, of course, this is due to the election of two Republican presidents without popular vote majorities, and the current popular opinion splits mostly along party lines. But I think it's better to look at this as a consequence of the Democrats becoming a party that represents mostly densely populated states, and increasingly only densely populated cities, while the Republican party generally represents rural and sparsely populated areas. It's worth noting that protecting the interests of rural, sparsely populated states is one of the original intents of the Electoral College, and so, the election of two Republican presidents without popular vote majorities represents the system working as designed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilPapa on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:47PM
At its heart, the electoral college was designed to protect landowners and slaveholders. Giving voters in sparsely populated states a vote that carries more weight than a city-dweller is a throwback to a time when aristocrats were farm and plantation-owners. In an age of an imperial presidency, why should the vote of someone living in a trailer park in Oklahoma count for more than a doctor in Chicago when it comes to choosing the president?
It is an anachronism and an abomination. A republic will always be inferior to a democracy, since it requires less from its citizens.
You are still welcome on my lawn.