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.
It’s the paradox of choice. With more options, people become more likely to not choose because it’s overwhelming.
according to some in this thread that makes them ‘fucking stupid’
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.
Apparently they had to vote their entire local government in this time because they reorganized it. In the future it will be a smaller field.
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.
Good.
That means it’s working as intended.
The people who are too dumb to use RCV have no business influencing policy with their votes.
people with poor reading comprehension or who just dont have the time to stare at a ballot for more than a couple minutes still deserve representation. just because someone’s circumstances differ from yours doesn’t make it good if they don’t have a voice
Those voters… how good do you think they are at resisting disinformation?
what do you propose
Using rcv to dissuade the uninformed voters, so the disinformed voters aren’t enough to elect a demagogue.
Ranked Choice Voting is the way forward.
But really? Do we really have to implement learning programs for this shit or something?
But really? Do we really have to implement learning programs for this shit or something?
Yes. Every time something new is introduced, people have to learn the new thing. Not everyone is as informed as you or I. Most people don’t care that much and have never considered alternative voting techniques.
It doesn’t matter. The people willing to learn about it will do so on their own.
If a system encourages people to not vote when they have no clue who they are voting for, then that might be considered a feature instead of an issue. Though one problem I can think off is that coaching of voters on how to vote becomes even more effective. I’m on the fence on this one.
Ps: is a 20% drop enough to say that something “cratered” or is this just another superlative clickbait title?
In a state that regularly sees 60+% and 70+% participation, yeah, 20% skipping those lines is a big chunk. I don’t think we have final turnout numbers yet.
According to the headline it’s 20% of those who voted for the mayor, not 20% of the population. So fe a drop from 60% to 48% voter participation.
It’s 20% of people who cast valid ballots skipping those lines.
So they chose to vote for other things on the ballot, but skipped voting for mayor and city council, meaning they chose not to participate there.
It looks pretty overwhelming, but remember that all of our voting is by mail. I had my ballot and voter guides for at least two weeks before the election. I felt like it took some work, but I had plenty of time and info to make informed choices.
I am in a district that had 30 city council candidates. There are three seats in each district and I already knew a few of the folks running in my district, so it was pretty easy.
Overall I really liked the rank choice, especially for mayor. There was one candidate I really didn’t like and I did not really have to choose between the other front runners based on who I thought had a better chance of winning (I also didn’t have a clear favorite between them).
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.
If you cannot compare the previous voter engagement to the current voter engagement then why title your post in such a way? Why blame ranked choice voting for “cratering” voter engagement if you have no metric by which to judge that?
Because the title of the post a) comes from the original source and b) also has nothing to do with previous elections.
1 in 5 voters, in this election, failed to vote on the ranked choice options when presented.
So A) i will have to assume that the original article is a bit of journalistic malarky. It’s locked behind a login so i don’t know if the article provides some reasonable backdrop to this 1 out 5 = cratering engagement BS, but i doubt it. More likely is that this is just more anti-alternate voting scheme propoganda.
B) it has everything to with previous elections. You can’t claim that a voting process has had a negative effect on some metric or another without inherently referencing previous elections. Something getting worse (voter engagement) requires that it was previously better. So yeah, the entire claim that this headline makes requires that it was better under the previous system.
1 in 5 voters, in this election, failed to vote on the ranked choice options when presented.
Sure, and if the headline stopped there it’d factual and i’d have no issue. Instead it specifically says voter engagement has worsened and then doesn’t back that up.
So i say again, show us the data on voter engagement from the previous system or stop spreading this status quo, two-party-maintaining hogwash.
The headline doesn’t need to mention previous elections because, in this election, 20% of voters skipped those lines while voting on other lines.
That’s where the “20% drop” is coming from. Compared to other lines on the SAME ballot, not previous elections.
So, they voted for President, Congress, etc, but skipped the ranked choice lines resulting in a 20% undervote compared to the rest of the ballot.
Having many candidates is one of a few weaknesses of Ranked Choice voting. I only recently switched my preference from RCV to STAR for this reason.
This is the link that helped me understand the advantages STAR voting has over RCV. Shared to me by a fellow lemminator
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”.
