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?
The city or county will probably have a thing called a website where you can read about all of those things for each candidate.
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.
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.
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.
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. :/
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.
The story buries the lede: there were 19 candidates on the ballot for mayor and 16-30 for each city council district. Several of the experts cited speculate that the number of candidates overwhelmed voters.
I always go over a sample ballot in advance and research each candidate. I would not have liked to do so for that election; local elections are difficult to research in general with many candidates getting minimal press and some not even bothering to put up websites.
Odd implementation of ranked choice. Probably too many choices without party affiliation listed for voters that didn’t come into the booth having already researched the choices. Sad because this will probably get used to say the whole concept is bad.
No voting booths here in Oregon. We get our ballots mailed to us along with a voter’s guide book with a page for each candidate. I’ve never seen anywhere near that many candidates before, though.
A selection of up to 30 candidates for a ranked choice does sound daunting. Yet despite that 80% of those that voted did complete those sections. That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me.
Edit: mentioned city council specifically. Changed to more generic phrasing.
Those pictures are brutal. You need to run some kind of preliminary if you’re going to have that many candidates over all. This isn’t an RCV failing it’s a failure to narrow the field with things like signature requirements.
I don’t think it’s that bad really. Someone mentioned 40+ candidates on a ballot in Germany.
I don’t remember ever seeing primaries for local government office positions.
