From the Boston Globe, an article of interest for Franklin:
"Though ranked-choice voting has been bruited about for years as a way to improve elections, I never wrote about it because the debate always seemed so abstract. It’s not abstract anymore. Question 2 on the Massachusetts ballot would implement ranked-choice statewide beginning in 2022. If the initiative passes, elections in Massachusetts will change dramatically.
It won’t be a change for the better.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting argue that the current system, in which the candidate getting the most votes wins the election, is unfair. In a two-candidate race, the winner always receives a majority of the votes, but when three or more candidates are on the ballot, it takes only a plurality, not an outright majority, to win. Ranked-choice advocates call that unjust. “Democracy is supposed to be majority rules,” says Evan Falchuk, who ran for governor in 2014 as an independent and now chairs the Yes on 2 Committee. “We should have a system where the majority wins.”
But by definition, ranked-choice voting only applies to elections in which there isn’t a majority winner. On a ranked-choice ballot, voters can list candidates in order of preference, rather than vote for just the candidate they like best. If no candidate gets more than half of the first-place votes, ranked-choice rules trigger a series of automatic do-overs, repeatedly reallocating votes that went to the least popular candidate until an artificial “majority” is created for one of the remaining candidates. Question 2 thus gives some voters multiple bites of the election apple. At the same time, it effectively disenfranchises other voters — those who don’t rank enough candidates for their ballot to last through multiple rounds of tabulation."
Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)
For information on the ballot questions and other items for the November election, visit the "Election Collection" https://www.franklinmatters.org/2020/08/2020-election-collection.html
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| Boston Globe: "Why ranked choice is the wrong choice" |
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