cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21917446
Ballot in question:
Mayor:
District 1:
I guess we see why ranked choice balloting was defeated everywhere except D.C. this year…
I mean I dont think thats so bad. But I bet that makes the average Americans eyes explode.
My neighbor state of Idaho is actively trying to stop it by saying it’s “confusing”.
Alaskan here - we’ve had RCV since 2020, and this year there was a ballot measure to remove it… Can’t have shit in this country 😒. Being too “confusing” has been the only argument against it I’ve heard (AKA, no actual substantial argument against it.) Oh, and I guess that we elected a Democrat for House Rep because of it. Definitely can’t have that.
Is this a new measure for Portland? I’m guessing people didn’t know about it? The link doesn’t really give details.
The measure was for state-wide ranked choice, it was defeated.
It was implemented at the city level for this election for mayor and city council.
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…)
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. :/
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?
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.
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.
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.
How many out of 5 chose a city councilor during the last election when no ranked choice voting was available? If you can’t provide that data then shush up.
Last election doesn’t apply because this is the first election with a new system of government for the city.
There are 4 districts, the top 3 vote getters in each district get elected.
My point being that you cannot blame the lack of voting for city counsilors (by one out of five people) on the new system without comparing it to the old system. Frankly, four out of five voters voting for City council doesn’t sound atrocious, and may or may not be perfectly normal for the city of Portland. Heck, without the data we don’t know if only three out of five people voted for city council under the old voting system. For all we know this new system actually increased that number. Do you see my point?
The thing is, the system completely changed to a point where it’s not comparable.
Old system:
5 city council members, elected city wide, vote for one person per seat, first past the post.
New system:
12 city council members, elected 3 per district, rank 6, top 3 elected.
So there’s more representation district by district, in fact, this is the very first time my district has had representation on the city council.
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.
