Hey good people get elected in a sane voting system that’s weird.
First Ranked Choice vote.
Elect Progressive.
Other politicians: ‘Okay that’s enough RCV for America’
Colorado just shot down RCV like 60-40 and it’s infuriating
Same thing happened here in the UK years ago. “Want to make out democracy better?” “Nah, mate.”
Well Oregon also voted down RCV statewide because it’s just too confusing lol
Oregon voted it down because of the pages upon pages of ragebait in the voter’s manual, that somebody with a lot of money paid to put there.
There was a lot in favor in there too
Our legislature passed RCV here in CA and our Dem governor vetoed it. Can’t be electing progressives over more big money neoliberal Dems, gotta keep that voting power bloc intact
Did Newsom take a rightward lean once he started getting groomed for a president run or has he always been this bad? I feel like every time I hear about him nationally hes doing something scummy like that or rounding up homeless people.
I want to say he’s always tilted in that direction, he was equally unloved as SF’s mayor. He’s old money, he’s always looked out for his caste’s interests.
This type of shit is exactly why Trump got reelected. The party is run by a bunch of charlatans.
They’re good at representing their constituents all right. Sadly their only constituents are people donating to their campaigns.
The UK did this about a decade ago by a 2-to-1 margin, on the same grounds. Commentators in Australia (which have had ranked choice voting for generations) quipped that this was final proof that Australians are smarter than Brits.
Was it too confusing or did someone spend a lot of money playing ads that kept saying it was too confusing I wonder. I’d actually love to hear what the local ads and media around that ballot measure were like if anyone is local to Oregon.
It wasn’t so much confusing as it was over saturated, like not even half the candidates had statements in the voter pamphlet and many didnt respond to questionnaires or anything. City council was even worse, my district had the entire back of the page filled with candidates like 20+ names.
I’m someone that likes to take time and research candidates, I’m all for choice, I’d rather have it than not, but I can certainly see how it turned people off of the idea, perhaps intentionally.
In a recent by-election I voted in, the ballots were 2-3 feet long with 91 candidates on them. This was in Canada, where we only have paper ballots. The majority of the candidates only registered as part of a protest to get the govt. to reconsider other voting methods than FPTP.
Woah! And I thought we had it bad here. There has to be a way to set some kind of reasonable barrier for entry
not even half the candidates had statements in the voter pamphlet and many didnt respond to questionnaires or anything.
That has been annoyingly common in elections all over the place for as long as I can remember.
You went to the effort of getting on the ballot, but you can’t be bothered to answer any questions or even tell people why they should vote for you?
I used to be more lenient, but it’s 2024 and people running for elected political offices with ZERO online presence just pisses me off. I know this is gonna blow everyone’s mind, but a large percentage of voters wait till the day before election to research any candidates, sometimes for less than an hour before giving up. It’s probably why most of them don’t fill out information so a voter just chooses them and they’re less likely to dissuade someone if they don’t say anything, at least it might’ve worked in the past.
It needs to be a required special-credit for highschool graduation to fully research and demonstrate you know the candidates on the ballet for your local election and register to vote. This could be bi-partisan, get everyone involved. It doesn’t take fully re-working a shafted education system to get more engaged voters.
I’m just kinda miffed by the whole situation with Oregon, first the drug re-criminalization and now a RCV vote just got squashed. Can’t wait to hear about everything that went down like with Alaska and Maine.
Am Oregonian, I didn’t see any ads about RCV. Plenty of ads about other measures and local candidates. Presidential race didn’t bother spending money on us as Portland, Salem, Eugene out number the rest of the state and generally vote dem.
Wild, thanks for the input, think im gonna try and read a little more about this and other rcv initiatives. Would love to be able to understand how they pass and fail in case my state decides to put it on the ballot in the future.
I’m still pissed that Coloradans voted down RCV on the ballot this season.
The word isn’t out on it yet. Not really. It’s pretty academic.
Tell people it solves this problem: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
Missouri too 😭 … Well, worse. Missouri made it illegal.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Illinois, but Missouri has been giving me whiplash over the last several years. I’d expect the kinda politics coming out of there from Florida, not a Midwestern state.
Maybe it’s me being from Ohio, but what’s the difference anymore?
arg. had this discussion about how Canada voted it down a few years back also because “too confusing.”
like, maybe there were too many options but I knew we needed to pick any of them instead of keeping the same bullshit system that has always required lesser of evil voting.
arg. people are so fickle and ignorant.
So did the rest of Oregon and it wasn’t even close. Too many people fell for the “it’s too confusing” propaganda, which is just another way to call the voters dumb, but maybe they’re not wrong.
Its just corporations having it both ways:
When corporations benefit: Americans can read like 900 pages of fine print a minute and are all legal scholars.
When it doesn’t benefit corps: Americans are cows, its offensive you’re trying to make these morons fill out multiple choice papers, they might accidentally poke out an eye on the pens.
Reality: people have limits but RCV ballots are not too complicated. We see it all the time with roundabouts. When new roundabout is put in a few drivers take some time to adjust but eventually they figure it out.
The change is harder to deal with than the actual thing.
which is just another way to call the voters dumb, but maybe they’re not wrong.
Given the outcome of the federal election, I’m increasingly convinced of that point.
I don’t know how it’s confusing.
Rank your top 5 favorite foods.
If you can do this, you can do ranked choice voting.
Rank your top 5 favorite foods.
See, you already lost me in all this confusion. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
Counting to five, too complicated for voters.
Meanwhile, the state initiative to pass RCV crashed and burned. :(
Missouri just voted to ban RCV!
This article is literally why. Political outsider with popular policies won, do you know how much money a voting system that does this will cost the people writing those laws?
Because money not spent/earned is money not lost.
I wish I could say I’m surprised…
Probably because it was incomplete for reasons unknown. I’m not sure why, but we get really bad ballot measures. 118 was super terrible, and 117 was seemingly unfinished.
Interestingly, we had extremely low turnout in the local elections. Apparently RCV, or the sheer number of candidates (over 100 for 12 positions), or a combination of both contributed to very low turnout. There were more people voting for POTUS than any of the local candidates, which is a little disappointing. I’ll dig into the numbers this weekend.
The new form of city government meant there was a significant number of candidates to parse through. And ranking several instead of picking just one favorite also added time. It took me several days to do my due diligence on all the measures and candidates when before I could usually get it all done in one.
Not complaining, though I could imagine people who don’t take voting seriously easily getting impatient/overwhelmed.
Indeed. If that had not been paying attention over the last couple of years and saw both sides of that second ballot, it would be super overwhelming. Thankfully I did my research ahead of time and knew how to vote before opening the ballot envelope. I still didn’t drop it off until a day or two before, though. After that article about the drop box fires, I figured it was a good idea to wait until mid day near election day.
Great! Next bring progressive change to Salem!
Fat chance. Kotek and the rest of the neoliberals have the state locked down.
